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A  LETTER 


TO 


AMERICAN  TEACHERS 


OP 


HISTORY 


BY 

HENRY    ADAMS 


WASHINGTON 

1910 


D 


ie03  H  Street, 

Washington,  D.  C. 
Dear  Sir  : 

Availing  myself  of  the  privilege  commonly 
granted,  in  the  liberal  professions,  to  age  and 
seniority,  I  use  the  freedom  of  an  old  colleague 
in  offering  this  small  volume  for  your  accept- 
ance. 

Some  fifteen  years  ago,  on  retiring  from  the 
Presidency  of  the  Historical  Association,  I 
made  a  short  address  on  the  relations  of  the 
Historical  Department  to  society ;  and,  had 
such  a  custom  existed,  I  should  have  gladly 
enlarged  the  paper  to  the  dimensions  of  a 
Report.  The  volume  now  sent  you,  is,  in 
effect,  such  a  Report,  unofficial  and  personal. 

Touching,  as  it  does,  some  of  the  most  deli- 
cate relations  of  University  Instruction  in  rival 
departments,  the  book  has  too  much  the  air  of 
provoking  controversy.     I  do  not  know  that 

iii 


j.«i^tf-<  :'•'  '«  ,.'  'I 


iv  LETTER  TO    TEACHERS 

controversy  would  do  harm,  but  I  see  nothing 
to  be  gained  by  provoking  it.  For  the  moment, 
the  problem  is  chiefly  one  of  technical  instruc- 
tion ;  of  grouping  departments ;  at  most,  of 
hierarchy  in  the  sciences.  Some  day,  it  may 
become  a  question  whether  one  department, 
or  another,  is  to  impose  on  the  University  a 
final  law  of  instruction  ;  but,  for  the  present, 
it  is  a  domestic  matter,  to  be  settled  at  home 
before  inviting  the  world  to  interfere.  There- 
fore, the  volume  will  not  be  published,  or 
offered  for  sale,  or  sent  to  the  press  for 
notice. 

For  the  same  reason,  the  volume  needs  no 
acknowledgment.  Unless  the  questions  which 
it  raises  or  suggests  seem  to  you  so  personal 
as  to  need  action,  you  have  probably  no  other 
personal  interest  than  that  of  avoiding  the 
discussion  altogether.  Few  of  us  are  required 
to  look  ten,  or  twenty  years,  or  a  whole  gen- 
eration ahead,  in  order  to  realise  what  will 
then  be  the  relation  of  history  to  physics  or 


LETTER  TO  TEACHERS  V 

physiology,  and  even  if  we  make  the  attempt, 
we  are  met  at  the  outset  by  the  difficulty  of 
allowiug  for  our  personal  error,  which  is,  in 
so  delicate  a  calculation,  an  element  of  the 
first  importance.  Commonly,  our  personal 
error  takes  the  form  of  inertia,  and  is  more 
or  less  constant  and  calculable.  For  myself, 
the  preference  for  movement  of  inertia  is 
decided.  The  risk  of  error  in  changing  a 
long-established  course  seems  always  greater 
to  me  than  the  chance  of  correction,  unless 
the  elements  are  known  more  exactly  than  is 
possible  in  human  affairs ;  but  the  need  of 
determining  these  elements  is  all  the  greater 
on  that  account ;  and  this  volume  is  only  a 
first  experiment  towards  calculating  their  past, 
present  and  future  values. 

Mathematicians  assume  the  right  to  choose, 
within  the  limits  of  logical  contradiction,  what 
path  they  please  in  reaching  their  results, 
provided  that  when  they  come  to  the  end  of 
their  process,  they  consent  to  test  their  result 


vi  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

by  the  facts  of  experience.     More  than  this 
cannot  fairly  be  asked  of  historians. 

If  I  call  this  volume  a  letter,  it  is  only 
because  that  literary  form  affects  to  be  more 
colloquial  or  more  familiar  than  the  usual 
scientific  treatise ;  but  such  letters  never 
require  a  response,  even  when  they  invite 
one  ;  and  in  the  present  case,  the  subject  of 
the  letter  involves  a  problem  which  will  cer- 
tainly exceed  the  limits  of  a  life  already  far 
advanced,  so  that  its  solution,  if  a  solution  is 
possible,  will  have  to  be  reached  by  a  new 
generation. 


16  February,  1910. 


CHAPTER  I 
THE  PEOBLEM 


The  mechanical  theory  of  the  uni- 
verse governed  physical  science  for 
three  hundred  years.  Directly  suc- 
ceeding the  theological  scheme  of  a 
universe  existing  as  a  unity  by  the 
will  of  an  infinite  and  eternal  Creator, 
it  affirmed  or  assumed  the  unity  and 
indestructibility  of  Force  or  Energy, 
as  a  scientific  dogma  or  Law,  which 
was  called  the  Law  of  the  Conserva- 
tion of  Energy.  Under  this  Law  the 
quantity  of  matter  in  the  universe 
remained  invariable;  the  sum  of  move- 
ment remained  constant ;  energy  was 
indestructible  ;     ''  nothing    was    added  ; 

1 


2  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

nothing  was  lost;"  nothing  was  created, 
nothing  was  destroyed. 

Towards  the  middle  of  the  nine- 
teenth century, — that  is,  about  1850, 
— a  new  school  of  physicists  appeared 
in  Europe,  dating  from  an  Essay  on 
the  Motive  Power  of  Heat,  published 
by  Sadi  Carnot  in  1824,  and  made 
famous  by  the  names  of  William  Thom- 
son, Lord  Kelvin,  in  England,  and  of 
Clausius  and  Helmholz  in  Germany, 
who  announced  a  second  law  of  dynam- 
ics. The  first  law  said  that  Energy  was 
never  lost;  the  second  said  that  it  was 
never  saved ;  that,  while  the  sum  of 
energy  in  the  universe  might  remain 
constant, — granting  that  the  universe 
was  a  closed  box  from  which  nothing 
could  escape, — the  higher  powers  of 
energy  tended  always  to  fall  lower, 
and  that  this  process  had  no  known 
limit. 


THE  PKOBLEM  3 

The  second  law  was  briefly  stated  by 
Thomson  in  a  paper  "  On  a  universal 
Tendency  in  Nature  to  the  Dissipation 
of  Mechanical  Energy,"  published  in 
October  1852,  which  is  now  as  classic 
as  Kepler's  or  Newton's  Laws,  and  quite 
as  necessary  to  a  scientific  education. 
Quoted  exactly  from  Thomson's  "Math- 
ematical ?iid  Physical  Papers "  (Cam- 
bridge, 1882,  Vol.  I,  p.  514),  the  Law  of 
Dissipation  runs  thus : — 

"1.  There  is  at  present  in  the  material 
world  a  universal  tendency  to  the  dissi- 
pation of  mechanical  energy. 

"  2.  Any  restoration  of  mechanical 
energy,  without  more  than  an  equivalent 
of  dissipation,  is  impossible  in  inanimate 
material  processes,  and  is  probably  never 
effected  by  means  of  organized  matter, 
either  endowed  with  vegetable  life  or 
subjected  to  the  will  of  an  animated 
creature. 


4  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

"  3.  Within  a  finite  period  of  time 
past,  the  earth  must  have  been,  and 
within  a  finite  period  of  time  to  come, 
the  earth  must  again  be,  unfit  for  the 
habitation  of  man  as  at  present  consti- 
tuted, unless  operations  have  been,  or 
are  to  be  performed,  which  are  impos- 
sible under  the  laws  to  which  the  known 
operations  going  on  at  present  in  the 
material  world,  are  subject." 

When  this  young  man  of  twenty- 
eight  thus  tossed  the  universe  into  the 
ash-heap,  few  scientific  authorities  took 
him  seriously ;  but  after  the  first  gasp 
of  surprise  physicists  began  to  give  him 
qualified  support  which  soon  became 
absolute.  "  This  conclusion  made  much 
noise,"  says  Ostwald  ('' L'Energie," 
Paris,  1910) ;  "  the  more  because  Helm- 
holz  and  Clausius  gave  in  their  adher- 
ence to   it.     We  owe   to  the  latter  the 


THE  PROBLEM  \^      5 

following  formula : — '  The  Entropy  of 
the  Universe  tends  toward  a  maximum.' " 
To  physicists,  this  law  of  Entropy 
became  "  a  prodigiously  abstract  con- 
ception," according  to  the  familiar 
phrase  of  M.  Poincare ;  but  to  the 
vulgar  and  ignorant  historian  it  meant 
only  that  the  ash-heap  was  constantly 
increasing  in  size ;  while  the  public 
understood  little  and  cared  less  about 
Entropy,  and  the  literary  class  knew 
only  that  the  Newtonian  universe,  in 
which  they  had  been  cradled,  admitted 
no  loss  of  energy  in  the  solar  system, 
where  the  planets,  at  the  end  of  their 
planetary  years,  returned  exactly  to 
their  positions  at  the  beginning.  Gravi- 
tation showed  no  waste  of  energy  what- 
ever, except  where  friction  occurred,  but 
had  planets  gone  off  like  comets,  and 
never    returned,    the    scholar    of    1860 


6  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

would  still  have  feared  to  question  the 
scientific  dogma  which  asserted  reso- 
lutely, without  qualification,  the  fact 
that  nothing  in  nature  was  lost.  If  no 
other  assurance  had  satisfied  him,  all 
doubts  were  silenced  by  the  famous 
outburst  of  eloquence  with  which  Tyn- 
dall  concluded  his  Lectures  in  1862, 
on  "  Heat  as  a  Mode  of  Motion."  Old 
men  can  still  recall  how,  after  explain- 
ing that  "the  quantity  of  the  solar 
heat  intercepted   by  the   earth    is   only 

o  orvM  r\r^r\  r\r\f\  ^f  tlic  total  radiation," 
Z,oUU,UUU,UUU 

Tyndall    refrained    from    telling    what 

became  of  the  heat  not   intercepted   by 

the    earth,    and    went    on    to    expatiate 

with   enthusiasm   on   the   unity    of  the 

universe  and  its  energy : — 

"  Look  at  the  integrated  energies  of 

our  world, — the    stored    power   of    our 


THE  PROBLEM  7 

coalfields ;  — our  winds  and  rivers  ;  — 
our  fleets,  armies  and  guns !  What 
are  they  ?  They  are  all  generated  by 
a   portion    of   the   sun's   energy    which 

does  not  amount   to   2,300,000,000    °^ 

the  whole.  This,  in  fact,  is  the  entire 
fraction  of  the  sun's  force  intercepted 
by  the  earth,  and  in  reality  we  convert 
but  a  small  fraction  of  this  fraction 
into  mechanical  energy.  Multiplying 
all  our  powers  by  millions  of  millions, 
we  do  not  reach  the  sun's  expenditure. 
And,  still,  notwithstanding  this  enor- 
mous drain,  in  the  lapse  of  human 
history  we  are  unable  to  detect  a  dimi- 
nution of  his  store.  Measured  by  our 
largest  terrestrial  standards,  such  a 
reservoir  of  power  is  infinite ;  but  it 
is  our  privilege  to  rise  above  these 
standards,  and  to  regard  the  sun  him- 


8  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

self  as  a  speck  in  infinite  extension, — 
a  mere  drop  in  the  universal  sea.  We 
analyse  the  space  in  which  he  is 
immersed,  and  which  is  the  vehicle 
of  his  power.  We  pass  to  other 
systems  and  other  suns,  each  pouring 
forth  energy  like  our  own,  but  still 
without  infringement  of  the  law  which 
reveals  immutability  in  the  midst 
of  change,  which  recognises  incessant 
transference  and  conversion,  but  neither 
final  gain  nor  loss.  This  law  general- 
ises the  aphorism  of  Solomon,  that 
there  is  nothing  new  under  the  sun, 
by  teaching  us  to  detect  everywhere, 
under  its  infinite  variety  of  appearances, 
the  same  primeval  force.  To  nature 
nothing  can  be  added ;  from  nature 
nothing  can  be  taken  away ;  the  sum 
of  her  energies  is  constant,  and  the 
utmost   man  can  do  in  the   pursuit  of 


THE  PROBLEM  9 

physical  truth,  or  in  the  application 
of  physical  knowledge,  is  to  shift  the 
constituents  of  the  never-varying  total, 
and  out  of  one  of  them  to  form  another. 
The  law  of  conservation  rigidly  excludes 
both  creation  and  annihilation.  Waves 
may  change  to  ripples  and  ripples  to 
waves, — magnitude  may  be  substituted 
for  number,  and  number  for  magni- 
tude,— asteroids  may  aggregate  to  suns, 
suns  may  resolve  themselves  into  florae 
and  faunae,  and  florae  and  faunae  melt 
in  air, — the  flux  of  power  is  eternally 
the  same.  It  rolls  in  music  through 
the  ages,  and  all  terrestrial  energy, — 
the  manifestations  of  life  as  well  as  the 
display  of  phenomena,  are  but  the 
modulations  of  its   rhythm." 

This  magisterial  tone  irritated  some 
of  the  new  physicists  to  the  point  of 
hinting  that   Tyndall   deliberately  mis- 


10  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

stated  the  facts  of  physics,  for  fear 
lest  some  one  should  drive  him  into 
a  logical  snare,  ending  in  the  necessity 
of  admitting  a  Creation.  In  flat  con- 
tradiction to  Tyndall,  Kelvin  and  Tait 
affirmed  that  "  the  same  primeval  force  " 
could  never  be  detected, — much  less 
recovered ;  that  all  nature's  energies 
were  slowly  converting  themselves  into 
heat  and  vanishing  in  space,  until,  at 
the  last,  nothing  would  be  left  except 
a  dead  ocean  of  energy  at  its  lowest 
possible  level, — say  of  heat  at  1°  Centi- 
grade, or  —  272°  C.  below  freezing 
point  of  water, — and  incapable  of  doing 
any  work  whatever,  since  work  could 
be  done  only  by  a  fall  of  tension,  as 
water  does  work  in  falling  to  sea-level. 
Between  such  authorities  the  unscien- 
tific student  could  not  interfere.  Na- 
turally,   all   his   sympathies   were   with 


THE  PROBLEM  H 

Tyndall.  The  idea  that  the  entire 
sidereal  universe  could  have  gone  on 
for  eternity  dissipating  energy,  and 
never  restoring  it,  seemed,  at  the  least, 
unreasonable ;  while  the  astronomers 
drew  up  lists  of  nebulae  by  hundreds 
in  the  A^ery  act  of  generating  universes, 
and  the  geologists  showered  the  theory 
with  rocks  in  order  to  show  that  the 
sun  had  already  reached  an  age  many 
times  greater  than  Thomson  was  willing 
to  allow  it. 

No  one  knew,  although  everyone 
explained  what  had  caused  the  inequali- 
ties of  energy ;  least  of  all  could  the 
historian  of  human  society  assert  or 
deny  that  energy  could  be  created  or 
could  not  be  destroyed.  The  subject 
was  beyond  his  province.  Since  the 
Church  had  lost  its  authority,  the 
historian's  field  had  shrunk  into  narrow 


12  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

limits  of  rigorously  human  action ;  but, 
strictly  within  those  limits,  he  was 
clear  that  the  energy  wdth  which  his- 
tory had  to  deal  could  not  be  reduced 
directly  to  a  mechanical  or  physico- 
chemical  process.  He  was  therefore 
obliged  either  to  deny  that  social  energy 
was  an  energy  at  all ;  or  to  assert  that 
it  was  an  energy  independent  of  physi- 
cal laws.  Yet  how  could  he  deny  that 
social  energy  was  a  true  form  of  energy 
when  he  had  no  reason  for  existence,  as 
professor,  except  to  describe  and  discuss 
its  acts  ?  He  could  neither  doubt  nor 
dispute  its  existence  without  putting 
an  end  to  his  own  ;  and  therefore  he 
was  of  necessity  a  Vitalist,  or  adherent 
of  the  doctrine  that  Vital  Energy  was 
independent  of  mechanical  law.  Vita- 
lists  are  of  many  kinds.  Students  who 
are  curious  on  the  subject  can  consult 


THE  PROBLEM  13 

the  "  Vitalismus  als  Gescliichte  imd  als 
Lehre,"  by  Dr.  Hans  Driesch  (Leipzig, 
1905)  ;  but  they  will  understand  it 
little  better  afterwards  than  before. 
For  human  history  the  essential  was 
to  convince  itself  that  social  energy, 
though  a  true  energy,  was  governed 
by   laws  of  its   own. 

To  the  generation  of  Lord  Macaulay 
and  George  Bancroft,  the  problem 
seemed  scarcely  serious.  They  could 
ignore  the  dispute,  since  Thomson 
agreed  with  Tyndall  so  far  as  to  admit 
that,  for  human  purposes,  the  Dissipa- 
tion of  Solar  Energy  was  so  slow  as  to 
be  indistinguishable  from  Conservation 
of  Energy.  The  historian  never  even 
took  the  trouble  to  inform  himself  of 
the  bearings  of  the  problem.  Indeed 
at  that  time,  the  Universities  showed 
a  nervous   unwillingness   to  teach  phi- 


14  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

losophy  at  all,  and  were  especially 
averse  to  all  pliilosopliies  of  history, 
whether  inspired  by  Hegel  or  by 
Comte,  by  Buckle  or  by  Karl  Marx. 
The  law  that  history  was  not  a  science, 
and  that  society  was  not  an  organism, 
calmed  all  serious  effort ;  and  histo- 
rians turned  to  the  collection  of  facts, 
as  the  geologists  turned  to  the  collec- 
tion of  fossils.  For  them  it  was  a 
happy  period,  and  literature  profited 
by  it. 

In  fact,  the  problem  was  by  no 
means  simple,  and  the  historian  might 
have  made  himself  a  very  competent 
professor  of  Physics  without  the  small- 
est profit  to  history.  Kelvin's  law 
asserted  the  constant  dissipation  of 
energy,  but  the  process  was  far  more 
complex  than  appeared  in  this  state- 
ment.    Energy   had   a   way  of  coming 


THE  PROBLEM  15 

and  going  in  phases  of  intensity  much 
more  mysterious  than  the  energy  itself. 
Catastrophe  was  its  law.  The  sun 
according  to  Tyndall,  wasted  into  space 
practically  all  its  energy  except  an 
imperceptible  portion  that  happened  to 
fall  on  the  earth ;  but  even  this  por- 
tion was  not  utilisable,  for  human 
purposes,  to  boil  a  pint  of  water,  at 
sea-level,  without  assistance.  Ice, 
water,  and  vapor  were  phases  sharply 
distinct.  So  the  imperceptible  portion 
of  solar  energy  which  fell  on  the 
earth,  reappeared  by  some  mysterious 
process,  to  an  infinitely  minute  measure, 
in  the  singular  form  of  intensity  known 
as  Vital  Energy,  and  disappeared  by  a 
sudden  and  violent  change  of  phase 
known  as  death.  Man  had  always 
flattered  himself  that  he  knew — or  was 
about  to   know — something   that   would 


16  LETTEE  TO  TEACHERS 

make  his  own  energy  intelligible  to 
itself,  but  he  invariably  found,  on 
further  inquiry,  that  the  more  he  knew, 
the  less  he  understood.  Vital  energy 
was,  perhaps,  an  intensity ; — so,  at 
least,  he  vaguely  hoped; — he  knew 
nothing  at  all ! 

No  one  knew  anything ;  and  yet 
the  analogy  between  Heat  and  Vital 
Energy,  suggested  by  Thomson  in  his 
Law  of  Dissipation, — and  received  by 
the  public  with  sleepy  indiiference, — 
was  insisted  upon  by  the  physicists  in 
accents  that  became  sharper  with  every 
generation,  until  it  began  to  pass  the 
bounds  of  scientific  restraint.  Already 
in  1884,  Faye,  in  his  "  Origin  of  the 
World,"  fairly  threatened  mankind  with 
its  doom  : — 

"  We  must  therefore  renounce  those 
brilliant   fancies   by    which   we    try   to 


THE  PEOBLEM  17 

deceive  ourselves  in  order  to  endow 
man  with  unlimited  posterity,  and  to 
regard  the  universe  as  the  immense 
theatre  on  which  is  to  be  developed  a 
spontaneous  progress  without  end.  On 
the  contrary,  life  must  disajDpear,  and 
the  grandest  material  works  of  the 
human  race  will  have  to  be  effaced  by 
degrees  under  the  action  of  a  few 
physical  forces  which  will  survive  man 
for  a  time.  Nothing  will  remain : — 
*  etia7ii  periere  ruinw  .' '  " 

Thus,  it  seemed,  that  whatever  the 
universities  thought  or  taught,  the 
physicists  regarded  society  as  an  organ- 
ism in  the  only  respect  which  seriously 
concerned  historians  : — It  would  die  ! 
If  life  was  to  disappear,  the  form  of 
Vital  Energy  known  as  Social  Energy, 
must  also,  presumably,  go  to  increase 
the  Entropy  of  the  Universe,  thus 
2 


y 


18  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

proving — at  least  to  the  degree  neces- 
sary and  sufficient  to  produce  convic- 
tion in  historians, — that  History  was  a 
Science.  Although  Faye  settled  this 
point,  as  a  matter  of  thermodynamics, 
as  early  as  1884,  his  successors  in 
authority  have  gone  on  repeating  it 
with  increasing  energy  of  expression 
ever  since.  To  these  outbursts  of 
prophecy  the  story  will  have  to  recur, 
but  for  the  moment,  the  only  point 
requiring  insistence  is  that  sixty  years 
of  progress  in  science  have  only  inten- 
sified the  assertion  that  Vital  Energy 
obeys  the  law  of  thermal  energy.  The 
sketch  of  Kelvin's  Life  and  Work  by 
Professor  Andrew  Gray, — Professor  of 
"Natural  Philosophy  in  the  University 
■of  Glasgow, — published  in  1908,  renews 
the  warning  in  almost  angry  terms. 
Once  more  he  asserts,  as  an  axiom  of 


THE  PKOBLEM  19 

physics,  that  all  work  is  done  by  con- 
version of  one  energy,  or  intensity, 
into  another,  and  a  lower : — "  If  this 
conversion  is  prevented,  all  processes 
which  involve  such  conversion  must 
cease,  and  among  these  are  vital  pro- 
cesses. ...  It  will  be  the  height  of 
imprudence  to  trust  to  the  prospect,  not 
infrequently  referred  to,  at  the  present 
time,  of  drawing  on  the  energy  locked 
up  in  the  atomic  structure  of  matter.  .  . 
After  a  large  part  of  the  whole  existent 
energy  has  gone  to  raise  the  dead  level 
of  things,  no  difference  of  temperature, 
adequate  to  work  between,  will  be 
possible,  and  the  inevitable  death  of  all 
things  will  approach  with  headlong 
rapidity." 

This  may  serve  to  represent  the  very 
last  opinion  of  physicists.  The  latest 
expression    of    metaphysics,  —  for    the 


20  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

present  purpose, — shall  be  taken  from 
the  notes  added  by  Eduard  von  Hart- 
mann  to  the  last  edition  of  his  works, 
dated  in  1904:— 

"  If  the  social  consciousness  of  today 

rebels  so   strongly  against   the   thought 

that  vital  processes  will  come  to  an  end 

in    the    world,     the    chief     reason     is 

because  society  has  indeed  absorbed  the 

first  principle  of  thermodynamics, — the 

conservation    of    energy, — but    not    the 

second,  the   progressive   degradation    of 

energy  by  dissipation   and   levelling  of 

intensities ;    and,    in    consequence,    has 

erroneously  interpreted  the  first  law  as 

though  it  contained  an  eternal  guaranty 

of  the  endlessness  of  vital  processes .  .  . 

In  reality,  the  only  question  is  whether, 

in  the   actual   result,  the   world-process 

will  work  itself  out  slowly  in  prodigious 

lapse     of     time,    according    to    purely 


THE  PROBLEM  21 

physical  laws  ;  or  whether  it  will  find 
its  end  by  means  of  some  metaphysical 
resource  when  it  has  reached  its  cul- 
minating point.  Only  in  the  last  case 
would  its  end  coincide  with  the  fulfil- 
ment of  a  purpose  or  object ;  in  the 
first  case,  a  long  period  of  purposeless 
existence  would  follow  after  the  culmi- 
nation of  life."  (Ausgewahlte  Werke, 
VIII,  pp.  572-573.     Leipzig,  1904.) 

Thomson's  famous  paper  on  "A  uni- 
versal tendency  in  Nature  to  the  Dissi- 
pation of  Energy"  was  published  in 
1852.  Seven  years  afterwards,  Charles 
Darwin  announced  his  law  of  Evolu- 
tion, which  involved  a  contradiction, — 
as  von  Hartmann  implies, — to  both 
the  laws  of  thermodynamics.  Thom- 
son, physicist  and  mathematician,  had 
thought  only  of  providing  the  energy 
necessary  to  move   his  world ;    Darwin 


22  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

neither  physicist  nor  mathematician, 
took  the  necessary  energy  as  given. 
Possibly,  if  he  thought  about  it  at  all, 
he  assumed  the  Law  of  Conservation 
as  the  mechanical  equivalent  of  Lyell's 
Law  of  Uniformity ;  but  he  seemed 
scrupulously  careful  to  avoid  asserting 
either  principle.  On  his  own  account 
he  never  committed  himself  to  the 
doctrine  that,  within  the  geologi- 
cal record,  organization  had  largely 
advanced,  or  risen  to  higher  powers, 
but  he  did  assert,  and  permitted  his 
followers  to  assert  much  more  broadly 
that  "  the  inhabitants  of  the  world,  at 
each  successive  period  in  its  history, 
have  beaten  their  predecessors  in  the 
race  for  life,  and  are,  in  so  far,  higher 
in  the  scale " ;  meaning  probably  that 
they  were  better  fitted  to  their  condi- 
tions,   but    conveying     the     idea    that 


THE  PKOBLEM  23 

their  vital  powers  had  risen  from 
lower  to  higher  by  the  spontaneous 
struggle  of  the  organism  for  life.  This 
popular  understanding  of  Darwinism 
had  little  to  do  with  Darwin,  whose 
great  service, — in  the  field  of  history, 
— consisted  by  no  means  in  his  per- 
sonal theories  either  of  natural  selec- 
tion, or  of  adaptation,  or  of  uniform 
evolution ;  which  might  be  all  aband- 
oned without  affecting  his  credit  for 
bringing  all  vital  processes  under  the 
law  of  development  or  evolution, — 
whether  upward  or  downward  being 
immaterial  to  the  principle  that  all 
history  must  be  studied  as  a  science. 

Society  naturally  and  instinctively 
adopted  the  view  that  Evolution  must 
be  upward ;  and  Haeckel  performed  the 
feat  of  measuring  the  height  of  each 
step  from  protozoa  up  to  man  ;  but  still 


24  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

witliout  further  attempt  to  account  for 
the  source  or  the  nature  of  the  numer- 
ous energies  implied  in  the  process  of 
elevation.  Apparently  he  felt  no  need 
of  invoking  any  energy  beyond  that  of 
uniform  solar  heat,  and  took  for  granted 
the  power  of  all  organisms  to  rise  in 
potential  by  its  absorption. 

Thus,  at  the  same  moment,  three 
contradictory  laws  of  energy  were  in 
force,  all  equally  useful  to  science : — 
1.  The  Law  of  Conservation,  that 
nothing  could  be  added,  and  nothing 
lost,  in  the  sum  of  energy.  2.  The 
Law  of  Dissipation,  that  nothing  could 
be  added,  but  that  Intensity  must 
always  be  lost.  3.  The  Law  of  Evo- 
lution, that  Vital  Energy  could  be 
added,  and  raised  indefinitely  in  poten- 
tial, without  the  smallest  apparent 
compensation. 


THE  PROBLEM  26 

Although  the  physicists  are  far  from 
clear  in  defining  the  term  Vital  Energy, 
and  are  exceedingly  timid  in  treating 
of  Social  Energy,  they  are  positive  that 
the  law  of  Entropy  applies  to  all  vital 
processes  even  more  rigidly  than  to 
mechanical.  "  Thus  it  is,"  says  Ostwald 
C' L'Energie,"  Paris,  1910,  p.  116), 
''  that  animated  beings  always  grow  old, 
and  never  young."  As  the  point  is 
pivotal  for  evolution,  it  must  be  under- 
stood as  admitted  in  the  Law  of  Degra- 
dation. One  of  the  latest  authorities, 
M.  Dastre,  professor  of  physics  at  the 
Sorbonne,  in  his  volume  called  "  La 
Vie  et  la  Mori"  (Paris,  1902),  lays 
down  the  dogma  in  one  line  : — ''  Vital 
Energy  ends  as  its  last  term,  in  thermal 
Energy."  He  admits  that  this  rule  is 
too  absolute ;  it  has  exceptions ;  but 
the  exceptions  are  not  serious  : — 


26  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

"  The  cycle  of  energy  ends  occasion- 
ally in  mechanical  energy  (movement), 
and  in  some  smaller  degree,  in  other 
energies,  as  for  example,  in  the  electric 
energy  produced  by  nervous  action  and 
the  muscles  in  all  animals ;  or  in 
functions  of  special  organs,  as  in  the 
rays,  torpedoes,  and  thunder-fish ;  or 
finally  in  the  luminous  energy  of 
phosphorescent  animals  ;  but  these  are 
secondary  matters."  The  essential  is 
that  the  second  law  of  thermodynamics 
rules  biology  with  an  authority  fully 
as  despotic  as  it  asserts  in  physics. 
"  If  chemical  energy  is  the  generative 
maternal  form  of  the  vital  energies, 
calorific  energy  is  the  form  of  waste 
(dechet),  of  excrement ;  the  form  which 
is  degraded,  according  to  the  expression 
of  the  physicists.  ...  In  the  animal 
organism,     heat     is     transformed     into 


THE  PEOBLEM  27 

nothing :  it  is  dissipated "  (p.  109). 
"  The  animal  world  expends  the  energy 
which  the  vegetable  world  has  accumu- 
lated." The  vegetable  world  draws  its 
energy  from  the  sun,  and  "  the  animals 
end  by  restoring  it,  in  the  form  of 
dissipated  heat,  to  the  cosmic  space." 

This  teaching  is  explicit.  Animal 
energies  accent  and  emphasize  the  law 
of  physics  that  nature,  always  and 
everywhere,  tends  to  an  equilibrium  by 
levelling  its  intensities.  Mechanical 
energies  admit  apparent  exceptions, 
like  gravitation,  but  animal  energies 
admit  none.  All  grow  old  and  die. 
This  is  the  teaching  of  physics,  and 
although  most  physicists  show  caution 
in  defining  exactly  what  they  mean 
by  vital  energy,  the  law,  as  they 
announce  it,  is  relentless.  For  human 
purposes,  whatever  does  work  is  a  form 


28  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

of  energy,  and  since  historians  exist 
only  to  recount  and  sum  up  the  work 
that  society  has  done,  either  as  State,  or 
as  Church,  as  civil  or  as  military,  as 
intellectual  or  physical,  organisms,  they 
will,  if  they  ohey  the  physical  law, 
hold  that  society  does  work  by  degrad- 
ing its  energies.  On  the  other  hand, 
if  the  historian  follows  Haeckel  and 
the  evolutionists,  he  should  hold  that 
vital  energy,  by  raising  itself  to  higher 
potentials,  without  apparent  compensa- 
tion, has  accomplished  its  work  in 
defiance  of  both  the  laws  of  thermo- 
dynamics. 

Down  to  the  end  of  the  nineteenth 
century  nothing  greatly  mattered,  since 
the  actual  forces  could  be  fairly  well 
calculated  or  accounted  for  on  either 
principle,  but  schools  of  applied  mechan- 
ics are  apt  to  get  into  trouble  by  using 


THE  PROBLEM  29 

contradictory  methods.  One  process  or 
the  other  acquires  an  advantage.  The 
weaker  submits,  hut  in  this  instance, 
the  difficulty  of  naming  the  weaker 
was  extreme.  That  the  Evolutionist 
should  surrender  his  conquests  seemed 
quite  unlikely,  since  he  felt  behind 
him  the  whole  momentum  of  popular 
success  and  sympathy,  and  stood  as 
heir-apparent  to  all  the  aspirations  of 
mankind.  About  him  were  arranged 
in  battalions,  like  an  army,  the 
energies  of  government,  of  society,  of 
democracy,  of  socialism,  of  nearly  all 
literature  and  art,  as  well  as  hope,  and 
whatever  was  left  of  instinct,  —  all 
striving  to  illustrate  not  the  Descent 
but  the  Ascent  of  Man.  The  hostis 
humani  generis,  the  outlaw  and  enemy, 
was  the  Degradationist,  who  could  have 
no  friends,  because  he   proclaimed   the 


30  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

steady  and  fated  enfeeblement  and 
extinction  of  all  nature's  energies ;  but 
that  he  should  abandon  his  laws  seemed 
a  still  more  preposterous  idea.  Never 
had  he  asserted  them  so  aggressively, 
or  with  such  dogmatic  authority.  He 
held  undisputed  possession  of  every 
technical  school  in  the  world,  and  even 
the  primary  schools  were  largely  under 
his  control.  His  second  law  of  ther- 
modynamics held  its  place  in  every 
text-book  of  science.  The  Universities 
and  higher  branches  of  education  were 
greatly,  if  not  wholly,  controlled  by 
his  methods.  The  field  of  mathe- 
matics had  become  his.  He  had  no 
serious  intellectual  rival.  Few  things 
are  more  difficult  than  to  judge  how 
far  a  society  is  looking  one  way  and 
working  in  another,  for  the  points  are 
shifting  and  the  rate  of  speed  is  uncer- 


THE  PROBLEM  31 

tain.  The  acceleration  of  movement 
seems  rapid,  but  the  inertia,  or  resis- 
tance to  deflection,  may  increase  with 
the  rapidity,  so  that  society  might 
pass  through  phase  after  phase  of 
speed,  like  a  comet,  without  noting 
deflection  in  its  thought.  If  a  simpler 
figure  is  needed,  society  may  be  likened 
to  an  island  surrounded  by  a  rising 
ocean  which  silently  floods  its  defences.. 
One  after  another  the  defences  have 
been  abandoned,  and  society  has  climbed 
to  higher  ground  supposed  to  be  out 
of  danger.  So  the  classic  Gods  were 
abandoned  for  monotheism,  and  schol- 
astic philosophy  was  dropped  in  favor 
of  the  Newtonian ;  but  the  classic  Gods 
and  the  scholastic  philosophy  were 
always  popular,  and  the  newer  philoso- 
phies won  their  victories  by  developing 
compulsory    force.      Inertia   is   the   law 


32  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

of  mind  as  well  as  of  matter,  and 
inertia  is  a  form  of  instinct ;  yet  in 
western  civilisation  it  has  never  held 
its  own. 

The  pessimism  or  unpopularity  of 
the  law  will  not  prevent  its  enforce- 
ment, if  it  develops  superior  force, 
even  if  it  leads  where  no  one  wants  to 
go.  The  proof  is  that  the  law  is 
already  enforced  in  every  field  except- 
ing that  of  human  history,  and  even 
human  history  has  not  wholly  escaped. 
In  physics  it  rules  with  uncontested 
sway.  In  physiology,  the  old  army  of 
Evolutionists  have  suffered  defections 
so  serious  that  no  discipline  remains. 
A  full  account  of  the  situation  would 
need  an  amount  of  knowledge  that  is 
now  granted  to  no  one ;  but  the  most 
trifling  popular  science  is  enough  for 
popular  teachers  like  ourselves. 


THE  PROBLEM  33 

Everyone  knows  tliat  Darwin  owed 
mucli  of  his  science  as  well  as  of  his 
success  to  Sir  Charles  Lyell,  who  sup- 
plied him  with  the  doctrine  of  uni- 
formity and  the  evidence  to  support 
it.  Darwin's  own  assumptions  or  theo- 
ries were  quite  sufficiently  difficult  of 
proof,  without  adding  the  doctrine  of 
uniformity ;  but  Sir  Charles's  ability 
and  authority  carried  the  point  in  spite 
of  Kelvin's  protest  that  uniformity 
could  not  be  admitted  as  possible 
under  the  second  law  of  thermody- 
namics. Lyell's  conservative  system 
of  evolution,  resting  on  several  broad 
assumptions  of  fact,  became  not  merely 
a  physiological,  but  even  more  a  philo- 
sophical dogma,  and  in  a  literary 
point  of  view  the  Victorian  epoch 
rested  largely,  —  perhaps  chiefly,  —  on 
the  faith  that  society  had  but  to  fol- 
low where  science  led;  to  — 
3 


34  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

"Move  upward,   working  out  the  beast, 
And  let  the  ape  and  tiger  die"  ; 

in  order  to  attain  perfection.  An  infi- 
nite series  of  imperceptible  steps,  con- 
tinuous under  uniform  conditions  since 
the  earliest  traces  of  organic  life,  and 
always  tending  upwards  to  liigher 
intensities, —  tensions, — potentials.  —  ac- 
cording to  the  growing  complexity  of 
the  organism,  had  already  taken  the 
place  of  religious  dogma,  and  bridged 
the  gap  between  two  phases  of  thought. 
With  a  sense  of  vast  relief,  the 
.generation  which  began  life  in  1850, 
embraced  the  new  creed,  not  so  much 
because  it  was  proved,  as  because  it 
was  convenient ;  but  it  met  with  in- 
stant difficulties  on  the  side  of  the 
Darwinists  themselves.  The  warmest 
■evolutionists  were  the  least  confident, 
not    only    about     adaptation     and    the 


THE  PROBLEM  85 

struggle  for  existence,  but  also,  and 
chiefly,  about  uniformity.  Heer's  re- 
searches on  the  arctic  flora,  already 
cited  by  Sir  Charles  Lyell  in  the 
tenth  edition  of  his  "  Principles," 
(London,  1867),  seemed  to  upset  the 
law  of  uniformity  from  top  to  bottom 
and  to  substitute  a  sweeping  law  of 
catastrophe ;  so  that  already  in  1879, 
Saporta,  in  his  History  of  the  World 
of  Plants,  asserted  that  nothing  less 
than  absolute  revolution  in  cosmic 
conditions  could  account  for  the  changes 
in  northern  vegetation.  During  the 
whole  period  since  the  eocene,  the 
temperature  of  the  planet  had  steadily 
declined.  "  The  phenomenon  to  which 
the  lowering  of  temperature  must  be 
referred,"  said  Saporta,  "  is  in  no 
way  peculiar  to  Europe ;  it  has  noth- 
ing sudden  about   it,   or   accidental,   or 


36  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

transient.      We   pointed   out   its   origin 
at   the    end    of    the   eocene ;    we    have 
marked   its   progress   by   its   increasing 
intensity  in  the   polar   regions,  and  by 
its   gradual    extension    thence    towards 
the   south.      At   the   beginning   of  the 
oligocene,  the  vegetation   of  the  north- 
ern temperate   zone   changes  character ; 
new  elements,  coming  from   the   north, 
and   marking    the    first    progress   of  a 
refrigeration,   introduce    and    propagate 
themselves.    We  have  studied  the  signs 
of  this  revolution,  by  means  of  which 
the  differences  of  latitude  tend  little  by 
little  to  accentuate  themselves.  ...     It 
is   impossible    not   to   admit,    when    we 
consider     this     march    which     nothing- 
stops,  and  which  continues  with  moder- 
ation  and   regularity,    the    influence   of 
a   cosmic    phenomenon    embracing    the 
terrestrial   globe   altogether."    (p.    322). 


THE  PBOBLEM  37 

The  inference  followed  :  —  "  We  recog- 
nise from  this  point  of  view  as  from 
others,  that  the  world  was  once  young ; 
then  adolescent ;  that  it  has  even  passed 
the  age  of  maturity ;  man  has  come 
late,  when  a  beginning  of  physical 
decadence  had  struck  the  globe,  his 
domain."  ("  Le  Monde  des  Plantes,"  p. 
109.) 

Nothing  could  be  more  fatal,  not 
to  Darwin  but  to  Darwin's  popular 
following.  As  Newton  said  that  he 
was  never  a  Newtonian,  so  Darwin 
might  perhaps  have  said  that  he  was 
never  a  Darwinian,  but  his  popular 
influence  lay  in  the  law  that  evolution 
had  developed  itself  in  unbroken  order 
from  lower  to  higher.  Kelvin  had 
indeed,  flatly  contradicted  this  assump- 
tion of  fact,  but  had  done  so  from  the 
physicist's  point  of  view,  as   a   matter 


V 


38  LETTEK  TO  TEACHEKS 

of  solar  heat  and  terrestrial  cooling; 
while  Saporta's  studies  of  vegetation,  to 
everybody's  astonishment,  so  drama- 
tically confirmed  Kelvin's  mathematics 
that,  though  the  two  streams  of 
thought  continued  to  flow  in  opposite 
directions,  Saporta  already  in  1878 
had  the  courage  to  incline  to  the 
"bold  suggestion  made  some  years 
ago  by  Dr.  Blandet,  and  approved  by 
the  late  M.  d'Archiac,"  to  the  effect 
that,  in  times  before  the  cretaceous,  — 
especially  well  shown  in  the  extrava- 
gance of  the  carboniferous,  —  the  sun 
equaled  the  orbit  of  Mercury  in  dia- 
meter. The  long  epochs  known  as  the 
Permian,  Triassic,  Jurassic,  Cretaceous 
and  Eocene  allowed  ample  time  for 
shrinkage  before  the  Miocene  first 
»  proved  by  its  temperate  vegetation,  that 
the    sun    had    approached    its    present 


THE  PROBLEM  39 

diameter,  and  could  no  longer  equably 
warm  the  world. 

Such  an  adhesion  to  the  law  of 
thermodynamics,  only  twenty  years 
after  Darwin  and  Lyell  had  established 
their  system  on  the  law  of  Conser- 
vation, seemed  to  strike  a  very  serious 
blow  at  the  theory  of  upward  evo- 
lution as  the  world  understood  it. 
The  violent  contradiction  between 
Kelvin's  Degradation  and  Darwin's 
Elevation  was  so  profound,  —  so  fla- 
grant, —  so  vital  to  mankind,  that  the 
historian  of  human  society  must  be 
supposed  to  have  watched  with  agon- 
ised interest  the  direction  which  science 
should  take ;  since  the  decision  of 
palaeontologists  would  fatally  decide 
his  own.  If  they  should  adhere  to 
the  high  authority  of  Saporta,  the 
biologists   must   follow ;    and   then   the 


40  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

historian  of  man  would  find  himself 
facing  a  responsibility  such  as  had 
never  before  entered  into  his  imagi- 
nation. 

Thirty  years  have  passed  since 
Saporta  published  his  "  Monde  des 
Plantes  avant  I'Apparition  de  I'Homme," 
and  a  whole  generation  has  indefati- 
gably  collected,  discussed,  published 
and  re-discussed  the  evidences,  with 
results  recorded  in  a  library  of  books 
and  in  a  score  of  great  geological 
museums.  With  the  truths  that  have 
been  established  or  the  theories  that  have 
been  proposed,  historians  need  trouble 
themselves  little,  or  not  at  all,  further 
than  to  ask  what  theories  are  today 
actually  taught,  or  are  accepted  by 
standard  authorities.  For  American 
purposes,  the  object  is  best  reached  by 
restricting  the  inquiry  to  the  last  ten 
or  fifteen  years,  and,  as  far  as  possible, 


THE  PKOBLEM  41 

to  the  schools  of  the  European  con- 
tinent, because  distance  makes  both 
teachers  and  teaching  impersonal. 
Beginning  with  France,  the  standard 
authority  in  geology  is  said  to  be 
Lapparent's  Treatise  (3  vols.  Paris, 
1906),  and  to  this  the  inquirer  turns 
to  ask  whether  Darwin's  ideas,  or 
Kelvin's,  have  prevailed  in  the  French 
schools.  The  answer  is  easily  found:  — 
"  If  there  is  one  fact,"  says  Lap- 
parent,  (Vol.  Ill,  p.  1951),  "that 
palaeontology,  and  especially  the 
branch  of  that  science  which  concerns 
the  vegetable  world,  has  put  in  strong 
evidence,  it  is  assuredly  the  progressive 
diminution  of  heat  in  the  high  lati- 
tudes of  our  globe."  Among  a  number 
of  explanations  suggested,  none  satis- 
fied all  the  conditions  except  that  of 
M.    Blandet, — the    diminution    of    the 


42  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

apparent  diameter  of  the  sun.  *'  Out- 
side of  this  conception,  the  maintenance 
of  the  solar  heat  is  absolutely  inexpli- 
cable (p.  1954).  .  .  .  One  cause  alone, 
according  to  the  laws  of  thermody- 
namics, is  capable  of  preserving  the 
solar  energy  without  appealing  to  the 
quite  inadequate  help  of  outside 
sources ;  —  this  is  the  phenomenon  of 
condensation  in  the  sun.  By  the 
means  of  such  condensation,  the  cal- 
orific power  of  the  sun  is  able  to 
maintain  itself  without  sensible  loss, 
by  means  of  a  lessening  of  apparent 
diameter  which  would  need  several 
thousand  years  to  become  perceptible 
to  our  most  delicate  apparatus.  .  .  . 
But  if,  in  our  days,  the  sun,  reduced  as 
it  is,  undergoes  still  this  movement  of 
concentration  necessary  to  maintain  its 
energy,  what  must  have  been  the  dif- 


THE  PROBLEM  43 

ference  of  its  dimensions  at  other 
epoclis  from  what  they  are  now? 
Nothing  is  more  logical  than  this  hy- 
pothesis, and  since, — while  irreproach- 
able from  the  astronomic  point  of  view, 
— it  is  alone  adequate  to  explain  the 
palaeothermal  phenomena,  we  think  we 
cannot  do  better  than  propose  it  for 
the  adhesion  of  geologists." 

Nothing  could  be  more  innocent  in 
intention,  or  at  least  in  appearance, 
than  this  adhesion  to  the  second  law 
of  thermodynamics, — this  harmonising 
of  several  great  branches  of  science, — 
this  unifying  of  nature ;  but  its  conse- 
quences to  the  old  law  of  Evolution 
and  to  the  school  of  Darwin  were 
beyond  disguise.  Lapparent  went  on 
to  indicate  some  of  them,  and  first  the 
necessary  abandonment  of  Lyell's  law 
of  uniformity :  — 


44  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

"Let  US  content  ourselves,  then  with 
indicating  the  possibility  of  this  solu- 
tion, while  affirming,  contrary  to  the 
doctrines  of  the  uniformitarian  school, 
that  the  ancient  history  of  our  planet 
has  unrolled  itself  in  the  midst  of 
external  conditions  very  different  from 
those  which  now  surround  us." 

While  Lapparent  offered  this  theory 
of  solar  shrinkage  as  only  a  possible 
solution,  other  geologists  were  working 
on  a  corollary  to  the  theory,  which 
has  become  one  of  the  commonest 
foundations  of  their  teaching.  Solar 
shrinkage  might  perhaps  be  suggested 
as  a  doubtful  possibility,  but  terrestrial 
shrinkage,  which  rests  on  the  same  law, 
seems  to  be  now  commonly  admitted 
as  a  reasonably  orthodox  dogma.  Yet 
terrestrial  shrinkage  is  a  mere  deriva- 
tive,   which    involves    solar    shrinkage 


THE  PROBLEM  45 

as    its    logical    and    mathematical    con- 
comitant.    If  adopted  as  a  fundamental 
law    of    geology,    it   must   be   admitted 
as  a  fundamental  law  of  solar  physics, 
since    the    one    is    as    inseparable    from 
the   other   as   a   Siamese    twin.     Natu- 
rally  the    theory   is    not    conceded    to 
be    true  ;  —  no    theory   is  ;  —  but    it   is 
convenient ;      it    is    taught ;      and    the 
chance   is   now  small  that  any  geolog- 
ical physicist  will  forego  the  temptation 
of  using   M.    Blandet's    theory  as   law. 
Fortunately    for    the    old    school    of 
geologists  —  as  well   as    for   all    schools 
of  historians,  —  the    few   certainties   of 
geology  as  of  history  are  so  easily  read 
in    opposite    senses,    that,    in    practice, 
every  teacher  can  teach  —  and  ignore,  — 
what  he   pleases.     Pure  geologists   still 
adhere    more    or    less    strictly    to    the 
uniformitarian     creed     and    reject    the 


46  LETTEE  TO  TEACHERS 

conclusions  of  Heer  and  his  followers. 
Geological  physicists  still  teach  that 
if  the  second  law  of  thermodynamics 
controlled  all  history  from  the  gaseous 
nebula  to  the  glacial  epoch,  it  has 
certainly  controlled  the  few  days  or 
years  since  the  ice-cap  retired  from  the 
Niagara  river.  In  that  case,  man  be- 
came the  most  advanced  type  of  physi- 
cal decadence,  no  longer  at  the  top  but 
at  the  bottom  of  the  ladder,  in  face  of 
accelerated  extinction. 

At  what  precise  moment  the  sun 
reached,  under  this  theory,  the  equilib- 
rium which  gave  the  utmost  exuber- 
ance to  organic  life,  only  a  specialist  can 
venture  to  say ;  but,  from  the  language 
of  their  text-books,  a  reader  gathers 
that  the  energy  of  vegetable  growth  is 
supposed  to  have  reached  its  climax  as 
early   as    the    carboniferous, — "periode 


THE  PROBLEM  47 

de  luxe,  s'il  en  fut  jamais "  (Saporta, 
73) ; — and  that  when  this  amazing  veg- 
etation lost  its  wonderful  power,  as 
shown  in  the  coal-formations  (Lappa- 
rent,  ii,  1027),  it  was  followed  by  an 
equally  astonishing  animal  growth 
which  lasted  into  the  miocene  period. 
There — we  are  told, — degradation  be- 
gan !  At  the  end  of  the  miocene, 
both  vegetable  and  animal  forms  of 
life  are  declared  to  offer  proof  that 
the  poles  could  no  longer  support  their 
previous  exuberance.  This  teaching 
assumes  that  the  equable  tempera- 
ture, whether  high  or  low,  which  had 
prevailed  from  the  poles  to  the  equator 
gave  place  to  climatic  differences  con- 
sequent on  the  sun  having  shrunk  to- 
wards its  present  diameter.  Nature 
instantly  showed  the  shrinkage  of 
energy.       "  In    spite   of    the   multitude 


48  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

of  beings  which  have  disappeared  at 
different  epochs,"  says  Gaudry  (''Essai," 
44),  "I  think  that  the  sum  of  appear- 
ances exceeded  that  of  extinctions  down 
to  the  end  of  the  miocene  period." 
The  steady  decline  continued  until  the 
convulsion  of  the  glacial  epoch,  when, 
in  the  midst  of  a  wrecked  solar  system, 
man  suddenly  appeared.  "  Since  this 
great  event  occurred,"  according  to 
Lapparent  (iii,  1655),  "  the  organic 
world  has  enriched  itself  with  no  new 
species,  but  several  forms  have  disap- 
peared, among  those  that  surrounded 
the  first  men ;  and  the  great  herbivorous 
mammals,  already  on  their  decline,  have 
seen  their  principal  representatives, 
little  by  little,  quit  the  scene  of  the 
world." 

This   statement,  as  a  mere   statement 
of  fact,  seems  to  be  accepted  as  rather 


THE  PKOBLEM  49 

unduly  mild;  but  not  yet  satisfied  with 
admitting  that  organic  geology,  like 
inorganic,  confirms  the  dissipation  of 
energy  down  to  the  present  day,  M. 
Lapparent,  abandoning  all  hope  that 
the  process  can  ever  be  reversed,  con- 
cludes (hi,  1961) :  "  If  any  new  term 
is  still  to  be  looked  for,  it  seems  as. 
though  none  could  be  imagined  other 
than  an  era  where  the  Soul,  freed  from 
the  bonds  of  matter,  should  dominate. 
Except  for  this  hope  there  are  none 
but  sombre  perspectives  in  sight  for 
all  that  surrounds  us.  The  progress 
of  the  emersion  of  boreal  lands  seems 
destined  to  extend  from  step  to  step 
the  influence  of  the  polar  ice.  The 
sun,  whose  condensation  is  already  far 
advanced,  will  soon  find  in  the  narrow- 
ing of  its  diameter  no  sufficient  source 
for  maintaining  its  heat,  and  large 
4 


50  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

spots  will  appear  on  its  surface,  des- 
tined to  transform  themselves  into  a 
dark  shell.  The  day  when  the  extinc- 
tion of  the  central  luminary  shall  be 
complete,  no  further  physical  or  physio- 
logical reaction  can  take  place  on  our 
globe,  which  will  then  be  reduced  to 
the  temperature  of  space,  and  the  sole 
light  of  the  stars.  But,  perhaps,  before 
arriving  there,  the  globe  will  have  lost 
its  oceans  and  its  atmosphere,  absorbed 
in  the  pores  and  fissures  of  a  shell 
whose  thickness  will  increase  from  day 
to   day." 

If  one,  and  by  far  the  most  extensive 
period  of  terrestrial  history,  is  already 
taught  in  this  sense  by  physicists,  all 
biology,  including  human  history,  will 
have  also  to  be  re-edited  by  them 
according  to  this  lugubrious  plan ;  and 
the    University  professor  of  history    as 


THE  PEOBLEM  51 

it  has  been  hitherto  understood,  will 
soon  have  urgent  need  to  make  up  his 
mind  whether  to  accept  or  resist  it. 
If  he  decides  to  accept  it,  he  has  only 
to  hold  his  tongue,  and  remain  quietly 
in  the  pleasant  meadows  of  antiquarian- 
ism,  protected  as  heretofore  by  the  con- 
venient and  sufficient  axiom  of  the 
nineteenth  century  that  history  is  not^ 
a  science,  and  society  not  an  organism ; 
but  if  this  resource  should  fail  him, 
his  first  thought  will  be  to  find  allies. 
He  will  seek  them  among  his  Darwinist 
friends,  to  begin  with ;  but  he  will 
scarcely  finish  the  opening  chapter  of 
the  last  book  on  Transformation,  Muta- 
tion, Inheritance,  or  whatever  new 
name  may,  as  one  writer  expresses  it, 
dissimulate  creative  or  destructive  force 
under  the  term  Evolution,  without  dis- 
covering that  the  familiar,  genial  dispute 


52  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

over  the  origin  of  species  has  turned 
into  a  sinister  and  almost  lurid  battle 
over  the  extinction  of  species,  for  which 
the  Darwinian  theories  of  survival  are 
declared  inadequate  to  the  point  of 
childishness. 

In  the  place  of  minute  variations 
extending  over  indefinite  time  under 
uniform  conditions,  he  will  find  that 
views  have  been  put  prominently 
forward  which  bear  an  alarming 
resemblance  to  the  second  law  of 
thermodynamics.  So,  one  palaeontolo- 
gist, —  Dollo,  —  formulated  in  1893  the 
law  of  evolution  in  three  sections,  each 
a  contradiction  to  the  old  law. —  1. 
Development  has  proceeded  by  leaps. — 
2.  It  is  irreversible. —  3.  It  is  limited. 
Another  authority,  Kosa,  gave  new 
form  to  an  old  idea,  by  showing  how 
variability  proceeds   according  to  a  law 


THE  PEOBLEM  53 

of  progressive  reduction  ;  —  that  is  to 
say,  every  series  of  forms  is  destined  to 
extinction  according  to  the  degree  of 
its  specialisation.  Even  if  this  law 
were  not  rigorously  exact,  "it  is  per- 
fectly exact  to  say  that  the  number 
and  extent  of  variations  diminishes  as 
the  specialisation  advances."  The 
reader,  who  marks  with  some  nervous- 
ness that  Man  has  certainly  advanced 
by  leaps,  and  that  his  progress  seems 
to  be  irreversible,  seeks  at  once  to 
know  whether  he  shows  signs  of 
reaching  its  limit ;  and,  for  an  answer, 
appeals  to  the  only  scientific  source 
of  information,  —  the  anthropologist. 

Unless  the  inquirer  is  full  of  courage, 
he  will  be  aghast  at  the  confusion  of 
responses  which  his  prayer  disturbs. 
Yet  he  knows,  if  he  is  an  evolutionist, 
that    Darwinians     have     always     had 


54  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

trouble  over  the  origin  and  end  of 
Man.  To  Darwin  and  Haeckel  the 
difficulties  were  as  great  as  to  their 
successors.  The  mystery  of  man  was 
then,  and  still  remains,  a  scientific 
scandal  which  has  inevitably  roused 
bad  temper,  and  sometimes  bad  man- 
ners, even  in  the  centres  of  science 
itself.  Every  investigator  in  turn 
evaded,  with  more  or  less  dexterity, 
— or  broke  through,  with  more  or  less 
recklessness, — the  difficulties  that  sur- 
rounded him ;  but  the  difficulties  out- 
lived the  explanations.  The  first  and 
most  notorious  was  due  to  the  fact 
that,  while  the  strict  theory  of  evolu- 
tion from  lower  to  higher  made  it 
reasonable  to  assume  that  man  was 
descended  from  that  group  of  animals 
which  resembled  him  most,  and  while 
there  was    no    doubt   that  the    nearest 


THE  PROBLEM  55 

group  whicli  could  be  supposed  to  lead 
up  to  him  was  that  of  the  anthropoid 
ape,  the  anthropologists  instantly  found 
so  many  scientific  objections  to  this  line 
of  ascent  that  it  had  to  be  abandoned 
from  the  start.  The  skull  of  the  young 
anthropoid,  it  appeared,  had  more  re- 
semblance than  that  of  its  adult 
parent,  to  the  skull  of  man ;  in  other 
words,  the  anthropoid  might  be  a 
degraded  man,  but  man  could  not  be 
a  developed  anthropoid.  The  search 
would  have  to  go  much  further  back, 
to  find  some  earlier  mammal  with  less 
resemblance  to  man,  and  therefore  with 
fewer  evidences  of  descent,  and  less 
probability  of  satisfying  the  rules  of 
evidence.  Each  step  in  the  ascent 
added  enormously  to  the  difficulties  of 
proof. 

Every  evolutionist  knows  how  disas- 


56  LETTEE  TO  TEACHERS 

trously  this  first  failure  affected  anthro- 
pology ;  nor  was  the  case  bettered  for 
the  anthropologist  by  Cope,  who,  reason- 
ing from  the  teeth,  made  man  descend 
from  an  eocene  lemur,  and  through  him 
from  the  marsupials,  without  passing 
through  any  known  group  of  anthro- 
poids at  all ;  —  a  leap  backwards  cover- 
ing such  vast  epochs  of  unknown  time 
and  change,  —  only  to  end  in  a  type 
much  lower  than  that  of  the  despised 
apes,  —  as  to  have  no  more  value  for 
human  history  than  though,  instead  of  a 
hypothetical  lemur,  the  palaeontologists 
had  offered  as  an  ancestor  a  hypo- 
thetical lingula  of  archean  time. 

All  this  fumbling  for  an  ancestry 
that  should  have  been  self-evident,  was 
sufficiently  disconcerting  to  historians 
who  cared  little  what  kind  of  a  pedigree 
was  given  them,  but  greatly  wanted  to 


THE  PKOBLEM  57 

be  sure  of  it ;  and  who  found  themselves 
embarrassed  with  a  primitive  man,  — 
or  probably  a  variety  of  primitive 
men,  —  running  back  without  interme- 
diate links  to  a  hypothetical,  primitive, 
eocene  lemur,  whom  no  one  but  a 
trained  palaeontologist  could  distinguish 
from  a  hypothetical,  primitive  opossum, 
or  weasel  or  squirrel  or  any  other 
small  form  of  what  is  commonly 
known  as  vermin.  For  the  historian, 
the  lemur  was  a  grievance.  It  offered 
no  foundation  for  any  theory,  whether 
of  conservation,  elevation,  or  degra- 
dation, physical  or  moral.  Even  the 
Church  had  always  admitted  as  sound 
doctrine  that  God  might  have  used 
more  or  less  consecutive  types  for  his 
creations;  but  between  the  hypothetic 
lemur  and  the  talking  man,  no  type, 
consecutive  or  other,  existed  for  God 
to  use. 


58  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

The  historian  had  certainly  a  right 
to  complain  of  this  Pharaonic  command 
to  adopt  a  lemurian  and  marsupial 
ancestry,  including  the  duck-billed 
platypus,  and  much  more ;  but  had  he 
rashly  attempted  to  seek  further,  he 
might  probably  have  found  worse.  In- 
deed, from  the  moment  when  science  had 
exhausted  the  whole  geological  series, — 
recent,  pleistocene,  pliocene,  miocene, 
oligocene,  and  part  of  the  eocene,  — 
without  coming  upon  any  reasonable 
or  respectable  ancestor  at  all,  the  search 
had  become,  for  the  historian's  purposes, 
worse  than  futile.  He  would  do  much 
better  to  fall  back  on  the  mere  hope 
that  his  own  historical  parentage  was 
lost  under  the  polar  snows,  —  like  the 
carboniferous  forests,  —  where  some 
happier  anthropoid  had  been  born  and 
bred   in   temperate  miocene   luxury,  to 


THE  PROBLEM  59 

be  driven  southward  before  tbe  ice-cap 
which  obliterated  every  trace  of  him 
and  of  his  polar  Eden  as  he  slowly 
drifted  towards  the  fortieth  parallel. 
Such  a  vague  but  aristocratic  origin 
would  relieve  him  from  quartering 
the  arms  of  the  lemur,  and  might  help 
him  to  suppress  the  opossum. 

Hoping  for  the  best,  he  next  turns 
to  the  last  text-book,  —  say  Hopf's 
"  Human  Species,"  (London,  1909), — 
and  first  notes  that  it  still  rests  the 
chief  weight  of  the  argument,  as  Cope 
did,  on  the  teeth,  but  in  a  sense  that 
startles  even  a  sincerely  convinced  evo- 
lutionist. Among  the  first  authorities 
quoted  is  Professor  Klaatsch  of  Heidel- 
berg :  — "  As  in  his  opinion,  man  by 
no  means  stands  at  the  head  of  all 
living  beings  with  respect  to  all  parts 
of  his  organisation,  so  too  he  considers 


60  LETTER  TO   TEACHERS 

that  the  human  teeth  are  among  the 
most  primitive  possessed  by  any  of  the 
existing  mammals.  Had  man  not  sacri- 
ficed twelve  teeth  in  the  course  of  his 
gradual  development,  he  would  now 
have  forty-four,  the  highest  number 
possessed  by  any  land-dwelling  mam- 
mal." Assuredly,  according  to  actual 
standards  of  physical  beauty,  a  man 
— and  still  more  a  woman — with  forty- 
four  teeth  would  raise  scruples  about 
the  law  of  evolution  from  lower  to 
higher ;  but  the  Professor  evidently 
regards  the  modest  number  of  our 
actual  teeth  as  a  decadence ;  and  goes 
on  to  say  that  even  as  to  his  molars, 
man  "  has  not  progressed  beyond  the 
stage  of  development  reached  by  the 
mammals  in  the  tertiary  period."  Not 
a  step  have  the  physiologists  advanced 
in  thirty  years   towards   proof   of   any 


THE  PKOBLEM 


CI 


rise  in  vital  energy.  Greatly  concerned 
at  this  evidence  of  feebleness  in  the 
evolution  of  man  from  the  eocene 
lemur,  the  historian  of  human  society 
naturally  asks  what  human  senses  show 
more  development  than  is  proved  by 
the  teeth.  Hopf  makes  no  pretence  of 
flattery  even  on  this  point.  *' Speak- 
ing generally,  man,  not  only  in  a  state 
of  civilisation,  but  also  the  primitive 
savage,  —  the  Papuan,  for  example, — 
has  a  much  less  acute  sense  of  smell 
than  that  possessed  by  animals."  (Hopf, 
240).  Finally,  though  discouraged, 
the  historian  probably  inquires  in  what, 
then,  the  evolution  of  man  from  lower 
to  higher  is  believed  to  consist ;  and 
he  learns  that  it  consists  in  the  extra- 
ordinary development  of  the  brain, 
with  its  instruments,  the  hand,  the 
foot,   and   the  vocal  organs ;    but  even 


62  LETTER  TO  TEACHEKS 

tlie  brain  is  said  to  show  extremely 
slight  real  differences  from  that  of  the 
higher  monkeys.  (Vulpien,  Legons. 
1866).  "  The  brain  has  passed  through 
evolution  in  all  the  branches  of  the 
tree  of  mammals  ;  it  is  highly  circum- 
voluted  at  the  extremity  of  certain 
branches ;  sometimes  the  richness  of  its 
circumvolutions  exceeds  that  of  Man  " 
(Topinard,  334)  ;  but  its  only  marked 
development  is  in  weight,  and  in 
number  of  ganglion  cells.  (Hopf,  168). 
Inevitably  the  puzzled  historian  asks 
almost  stupidly  whether  the  anthropo- 
logist holds  this  increase  of  brain  to 
prove  evolution  from  lower  to  higher, 
and  he  receives  an  answer  that  totally 
demoralizes  him.  The  weight  of  the 
brain  is  not  asserted  to  be  a  gauge  of 
its  energy.  Neither  instinct  nor  rea- 
son  is  supposed   to   have  any   relation 


THE  PKOBLEM  63 

to  the  weight  of  the  brain ;  on  the 
contrary,  "  in  a  list  of  seventeen  brains, 
the  heaviest  known,  going  from  1729 
to  2020  grams,  there  are  seven  luna- 
tics," and  only  three  men  of  science, 
about  whose  degree  of  aberration  no 
exact  statistics  can  be  reasonably  ex- 
pected.    (Topinard,  216). 

This  is  only  the  beginning  of  anthro- 
pological evolution  from  lower  to 
higher.  The  anthropologist  seems  in- 
clined to  hold  that  what  is  called 
genius  has  no  relation  with  weight  of 
brain ;  but  that,  even  though  it  had, 
it  would  not  help  evolution,  if  Arndt 
is  right  in  asserting  that  superior  mental 
endowment  of  any  kind  is  a  sign  of 
degeneration ;  or  if  Branco  is  right  in 
thinking  it  impossible  that  the  progres- 
sive enlargement  of  the  human  brain 
can  go  on  indefinitely  without  enfeebling 


64  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

the  body  till  it  dies  out ;  or  if  Hopf  is 
right  (p.  374),  in  admitting  that,  in 
civilised  races,  increase  in  intellectual 
power  often  goes  with  a  narrowing  of 
the  jaw  and  an  early  loss  of  the  teeth, 
and  of  the  hair,  and  in  women  with  an 
inability  to  suckle  their  children.  To 
complete  the  picture,  the  anthropologist 
who  hesitates  to  say  in  what  sense  the 
brain  should  be  regarded  as  proving 
evolution  from  lower  to  higher,  shows 
not  the  least  sign  of  doubt  in  regard  to 
the  degree  to  which  Man  is  specialised, 
particularly  as  shown  by  his  brain,  his 
hand,  his  foot  and  his  vocal  organs. 
In  fact,  according  to  Louis  Agassiz, 
man  is  ''the  last  term  of  a  series 
beyond  which,  following  the  plan  on 
which  the  whole  animal  kingdom  is 
built,  no  further  progress  is  materially 
possible,"  ("  Be  I'Esprit,"  p.  34),  and  is, 


THE   PROBLEM  66 

therefore,  under  Rosa's  law  of  progres- 
sive reduction,  destined  to  be  rapidly 
extinguished. 

Thus  the  physical  geologist  has 
frankly  and  finally  gone  over  to  the 
side  of  Kelvin ;  the  palaeontologist  has 
kept  him  company  or  even  went  before 
him ;  while  the  anthropologist  is  some- 
what painfully  hesitating,  obedient  to 
the  physicists,  but  trying  to  remain 
true  to  humanity,  though  acutely  con- 
scious that  the  two  directions  cannot 
be  reconciled.  For  many  years  M. 
Topinard  has  held  a  sort  of  position 
as  semi-official  anthropologist  of  France, 
but  he  has  become  incoherent  with  age, 
finding  himself  caught  between  the 
irreconcileable  contradictions  of  science 
and  sentiment:  —  "The  end,  as  far  as 
concerns  us,  we  know,"  he  says  in  his 
last  volume  ("  L'Anthropologie,"  Paris, 
5 


66  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

1900) ;    "  our    earth    will    cease   to    be 
habitable ;    it  will  grow  cold  ;    will  lose 
its    atmosphere    and   its   moisture,    and 
will  resemble  our  actual  moon.     Previ- 
ously, evolution,   from   progressive   will 
become     stationary,     then      regressive. 
Some    day,    as    Huxley    suggests,    the 
lichens,  the  diatomaceae,  the  protococcus, 
will  perhaps  be  the  only  beings  adapted 
to    the    conditions;  —  then,    nothing!" 
The  picture  seems  sad  enough,  yet   M. 
Topinard     might     have     added     that, 
according    to    his    own    palaeontologist 
authorities,    the    evolution    of    life    on 
the  earth  had  ceased  to  be   progressive 
some   millions   of   years   ago,    and   had 
passed    through     its    stationary    period 
into    regression    before    man    ever    ap- 
peared ;     while    M.    Topinard    himself 
adds  (pp.  321,  370)  that,  "to  his  stupe- 
faction," he  has  reached  conclusions  of 


THE  PROBLEM  67 

his  own  which  seem,  to  readers  who 
do  not  take  these  opinions  too  seriously, 
exceedingly  like  an  admission  that 
he  j&nds  himself  an  example  of  the 
second  law  of  thermodynamics  :  — 

"  Yes !  there  is  contradiction  between 
the  animal  man, — as  he  was  in  a  state  of 
nature,  and  as  he  has  maintained  himself 
to  our  day,  —  and  the  social  man  such 
as  he  ought  to  be.  Yes !  the  objective 
realities  of  science  are  in  contradiction 
with  the  subjective  aspirations  of  man. 
Yes !  nature  laughs  at  our  conceptions. 
Society  has  been  born  of  man,  and  has 
been  built  on  sand,  often  with  only 
materials  of  convention.  The  individ- 
ual for  whom  it  is  created  is  always  its 
worst  enemy ;  he  admits  it,  but  will 
not  bend  to  its  necessities." 

Although  M.  Topinard  adhered  blind- 
ly to  the  second  law  of  thermodynamics 


68  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

in  regard  to  the  approaching  end  of 
the  world,  and  was  logically  obliged  to 
accept  its  conclusion  that  all  useful 
work  or  progress,  social  or  mechanical, 
depended  on  inequalities  of  intensity, 
endowed  with  energy  still  left  to  dis- 
sipate, the  moment  he  realizes  that 
such  inequalities  still  exist,  and  that 
therefore  progress  is  still  possible,  he 
bewails  the  fact  as  an  inexplicable  and 
unfortunate  mystery.  Such  cross-pur- 
poses have  become  almost  a  standard 
rule  in  sociology.  They  have  always 
been  the  rule  in  history. 

In  the  earlier  scientific  commenta- 
ries on  the  Law  of  Dissipation,  astron- 
omers and  physicists  commonly  took 
some  little  pains  to  soften  the  harsh- 
ness of  their  doom  by  assurances  that 
the  prospect  was  not  so  black  as  it 
seemed,  but  that   the    sun  would  adapt 


THE  PROBLEM  69 

itself  to  man's  convenience  by  allowing 
some  thousands  or  millions  of  years 
to  elapse  before  its  extinction.  This 
pleasing  thoughtfulness  has  vanished. 
Geologists,  when  most  generous,  scarce- 
ly allow  more  than  thirty  thousand 
years  since  the  last  ice-cap  began  its 
partial  recession;  while,  quite  commonly, 
they  insist  that  their  most  careful 
and  elaborate  estimates  do  not  justify 
them  in  granting  more  than  a  quarter 
of  that  time  to  the  very  incomplete 
process  of  clearing  away  the  ice  and 
snow  from  the  streets  of  primitive 
New  York  and  Boston.  The  cataclys- 
mic ruin  that  spread  over  all  the  most 
populous  parts  of  the  northern  hemi- 
sphere while  the  accomplished  and 
highly  educated  architects  of  Nippur 
were  laying  the  arched  foundations  of 
their  city,  has,  it  is  true,  been  partially 


70  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

covered  or  disguised  under  new  yege- 
tation ;  but  even  this  brief  retrospec- 
tive reprieve  is  darkened  by  the 
earnest  assurances  of  the  most  popular 
text-books  and  teachers  that  they  can 
hold  out  no  good  reason  for  hoping 
that  the  exemption  will  last.  The 
sun  is  ready  to  condense  again  at  any 
moment,  causing  another  violent  dis- 
equilibrium, to  be  followed  by  another 
great  outburst  and  waste  of  its  expiring 
heat. 

The  humor  of  these  prophecies  sel- 
dom strikes  a  reader  with  its  full  force 
in  America,  but  in  Europe  the  love 
of  dramatic  effect  inspires  every  line. 
Compared  with  the  superficial  and  self- 
complacent  optimism  which  seems  to 
veneer  the  surface  of  society,  the  fre- 
quent and  tragic  outbursts  of  physicists, 
astronomers,    geologists,   biologists,    and 


THE  PROBLEM  71 

sociological  socialists  announcing  the  ^ 
end  of  tlie  world,  surpass  all  that 
could  be  conceived  as  a  natural  pro- 
duct of  the  time.  The  note  of  warning 
verges  on  the  grotesque ;  it  is  hysteri- 
cally solemn ;  a  little  more,  and  it 
would  sound  like  that  of  a  Salvation 
army ;  a  small  natural  shock  might 
easily  turn  it  to  a  panic.  Naturally  a 
historian  is  most  interested  in  what 
concerns  primitive  history,  and  all  the 
relations  of  primitive  man  to  nature. 
He  takes  up  the  last  work  on  the  sub- 
ject, which  happens,  in  1910,  to  be 
"  Les  Premieres  Civilisations,"  by  M. 
J.  de  Morgan,  published  in  June,  1909. 
M.  de  Morgan  is  one  of  the  highest 
authorities  —  possibly  quite  the  highest 
authority  —  on  his  subject,  and  this 
volume  contains  the  whole  result  of 
his  vast  study.     Unconscious   of   ther- 


72  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

modynamics,  he  treats  primitive  man 
as  a  sort  of  function  of  the  glacial 
epoch,  and  ends  by  telling  his  readers 
(p.  97) :  - 

"  The  glacial  period  is  far  from  being 
ended ;  our  times,  which  still  make 
an  integral  part  of  it,  are  characterised 
by  an  important  retreat  of  the  glaciers, 
started  long  before  the  beginnings  of 
history.  It  is  to  be  supposed  that 
this  retreat  of  the  ice  is  not  definitive, 
but  that  the  cold  will  return,  and  with 
it  the  depopulation  of  a  part  of  our 
globe.  Nothing  can  enable  us  to  fore- 
tell the  amplitude  of  this  future  oscil- 
lation, or  the  lot  which  the  laws  of 
nature  destine  to  humanity.  During 
this  cataclysm  revolutions  will  occur 
which  the  most  fecund  imagination  can- 
not conceive,  —  disasters  the  more  horri- 
ble because,  while  the  population  of  the 


THE  PKOBLEM  73 

earth  goes  on  increasing  every  day,  and 
even  the  less  favored  districts  little  by 
little  become  inhabited,  the  different 
human  groups,  crowded  back  one  on 
another,  and  finding  no  more  space  for 
existence,  will  be  driven  to  internecine 
destruction." 

M.  de  Morgan  belongs  to  the  most 
serious  class  of  historians,  while  M.  Ca- 
mille  Flammarion,  the  distinguished 
director  of  the  Meudon  observatory, 
besides  being  a  serious  astronomer,  is 
also  one  of  the  most  widely  read,  and 
most  highly  intelligent,  vulgarisers  of 
science.  When  he  reaches  the  point 
of  describing  the  solar  catastrophe  in 
his  popular  astronomy,  he  lays  bare 
an  enormous  field  for  harrowing  hor- 
rors. ("Astronomic  Populaire,"  102, 
103,  Paris,  1905) :  — 

"  Life  and  human  activity  will  insen- 


74  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

sibly  be  sliut  up  within  the  tropical 
zones.  Saint  Petersburg,  Berlin,  Lon- 
don, Paris,  Vienna,  Constantinople, 
Rome,  will  successively  sink  to  sleep 
under  their  eternal  cerements.  During 
many  centuries,  equatorial  humanity 
will  undertake  vain  arctic  expeditions 
to  rediscover  under  the  ice  the  sites  of 
Paris,  of  Bordeaux,  of  Lyons,  of 
Marseilles.  The  sea-shores  will  have 
changed  and  the  map  of  the  earth  will 
be  transformed.  No  longer  will  man 
live,  —  no  longer  will  he  breathe,  — 
except  in  the  equatorial  zone,  down  to 
the  day  when  the  last  tribe,  already 
expiring  in  cold  and  hunger,  shall 
camp  on  the  shores  of  the  last  sea  in 
the  rays  of  a  pale  sun  which  will 
henceforward  illumine  an  earth  that 
is  only  a  wandering  tomb,  turning 
around    a   useless    light   and   a   barren 


THE  PEOBLEM  75 

heat.  Surprised  by  the  cold,  the  last 
human  family  has  been  touched  by 
the  finger  of  death,  and  soon  their 
bones  will  be  buried  under  the  shroud 
of  eternal  ice.  The  historian  of  nature 
would  then  be  able  to  write  :  —  *  Here 
lies  the  entire  humanity  of  a  world 
which  has  lived !  Here  lie  all  the 
dreams  of  ambition,  all  the  conquests 
of  military  glory,  all  the  resounding 
affairs  of  finance,  all  the  systems  of 
an  imperfect  science,  and  also  all  the 
oaths  of  mortals'  love !  Here  lie  all 
the  beauties  of  earth  ! '  —  But  no  mor- 
tuary stone  will  mark  the  spot  where 
the  poor  planet  shall  have  rendered  its 
last   sigh !  " 

As  though  to  assure  the  public  that 
he  knows  what  he  is  talking  about, 
M.  Flammarion,  who  is  a  practical 
astronomer,    goes    on    with    a     certain 


76  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

sombre  exaltation,  like  a  religious 
prophet,  to  say  that  the  terrors  he 
predicts  are  of  common  occurrence  in 
astronomy,  and  leaves  his  scholars  to 
infer  that  nature  regards  her  end  as 
attained  only  when  she  has  treated 
man    as    an    enemy    to    be  crushed :  — 

"  Already  we  have  seen  twenty-five 
stars  sparkle  with  a  spasmodic  light 
in  the  heavens,  and  fall  back  in 
extinction  neighboring  death  !  Already 
some  of  the  brilliant  stars  hailed  by 
our  fathers  have  disappeared  from  the 
charts  of  the  sky,  and  a  great  number 
of  red  stars  have  entered  into  their 
period  of  extinction  !  " 

Volumes  would  be  needed  if  a  writer 
should  attempt  to  follow  the  track  of 
this  idea  through  all  the  branches  of 
present  thought ;  but,  without  unneces- 
sarily disturbing  the  labors   of  anthro- 


THE  PKOBLEM  77 

pology  and  biology,  the  merest  insect 
might  be  excused  for  asking  what 
happens  to  fellow  insects,  who,  like 
himself,  are  enjoying  the  precarious 
hospitality  of  these  numerous  solar 
systems.  M.  de  Morgan  and  M.  Flam- 
marion  are  contented  with  freezing 
them ;  but  M.  Lapparent  takes  the 
loftier  view  that  they  will  do  better  to 
become  disembodied  spirits ;  which  is 
even  less  likely  to  suit  either  the 
American  professor  or  the  American 
student,  whose  ideas  of  education  are 
exceptionally  practical.  The  "soul, 
freed  from  the  bonds  of  matter,"  seems 
to  require  no  education  unless  in  the 
passive  consciousness  of  pure  mathe- 
matics and  logic,  which  has  hitherto 
been  the  weakest  side  of  the  American 
student,  who  is  averse  even  to  the 
ingenuous  simplicity  of  logarithms  and 


78  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

vectors.  More  than  this,  the  law  of 
degradation  inexorably  implies  that, 
throughout  the  whole  series  of  phases 
which  may  intervene  in  the  future  as 
in  the  past,  in  the  dissipation  of  the 
higher  intensities,  a  sympathetic  exhaus- 
tion must  be  expected  in  all  the  ener- 
gies dependent  on  the  central  system, 
among  which,  as  the  palaeontologists 
and  physicists  have  assured  us,  the 
vital  energies  are  not  only  the  most 
dependent,  but  also,  and  particularly 
the  most  sensitive.  Physical  or  mental, 
they  should,  according  to  theory,  suffer 
an  accelerated  decline,  and  yet  their 
actual  position  should  also  show  a  cer- 
tain lag  behind  the  rate  of  the  central 
energy.  They  are  really  worse  off  than 
they  seem.  The  soothing  vision  of 
thousands  or  millions  of  years,  for  the 
ultimate    extinction     of    solar    energy 


THE  PKOBLEM  79 

protects   the   Universities    to    a   highly 
inadequate  degree  from   their   own    ex- 
tinction   in   the   process.      All   energies 
which   are    convertible   into   heat   must 
suffer  degradation ;  among  these,  as  the 
physicists  expressly  insist,  are  all  vital 
processes  ;   the  mere  temporary  approach 
to  a  final   equilibrium  would    be   fatal ; 
and,  among  all  the  infinite  possibilities 
of  evolution,  the  only  absolute  certainty 
in  physics  is  that  the  earth  every  day 
approaches  it.     No    one  can  be  trusted 
to  express  so  much  as  an  opinion  about 
the    moment    when    any    special    vital 
process   may   expect   to   be   reduced   in 
energy ;  man  and  beast  can,  at  the  best, 
look     forward     only    to    a    diversified 
agony  of  twenty  million  years;  but   at 
no   instant   of  this   considerable   period 
can  the  professor  of  mathematics  flatter 
either  himself  or  his  students  with  an 


80  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

exclusive  or  extended  hope  of  escaping 
imbecility. 

According  to  some  geologists,  this 
view  is  extravagantly  —  almost  ridicu- 
lously— optimistic;  but  with  the  scien- 
tific correctness  of  these  opinions,  the 
historian  is  not  concerned.  He  asks 
only  how  far  the  teaching  of  his  col- 
leagues contradicts  his  own,  and  how 
far  society  sides  with  his  contradictors. 
His  question  is  difficult  to  answer. 
At  first  sight  he  is  conscious  of  no 
divergence.  Society  has  the  air  of 
taking  for  granted  its  indefinite  pro- 
gress towards  perfection  with  more 
confidence,  and  sometimes  with  more 
dogmatism  than  in  1830,  when 
Macaulay  made  it  a  literary  law  by 
his  famous  polemic  against  Southey. 
Yet  the  same  society  has  acquired  a 
growing  habit  of  feeling  its  own  pulse, 


THE  PROBLEM  81 

and  registering  its  own  temperature, 
from  day  to  day ;  of  prescribing  to 
itself  new  regimes  from  year  to  year ; 
and  of  doubting  its  own  Health  like 
a  nervous  invalid.  Granting  that  the 
intended  effect  of  intellectual  education 
is,  —  as  Bacon,  Descartes  and  Kant 
began  by  insisting,  —  a  habit  of  doubt, 
it  is  only  in  a  very  secondary  sense 
a  habit  of  timidity  or  despair.  To 
a  certain  point,  the  more  education, 
the  more  hesitation ;  but  beyond  that 
point,  confidence  should  begin.  Keep- 
ing Europe  still  in  view  for  illustration 
and  assuming  for  the  moment  that 
America  does  not  exist,  every  reader 
of  the  French  or  German  papers  knows 
that  not  a  day  passes  without  pro- 
ducing some  uneasy  discussion  of 
supposed  social  decrepitude  ;  —  fall- 
ing off  of  the  birth-rate ;  —  decline 
of     rural     population ;  —  lowering     of 


82  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

army  standards,  —  multiplication  of 
suicides,  —  increase  of  insanity  or 
idiocy,  —  of  cancer,  —  of  tuberculosis ;  — 
signs  of  nervous  exhaustion,  —  of  en- 
feebled vitality,  —  "  habits  "  of  alco- 
holism and  drugs,  —  failure  of  eye-sight 
in  the  young,  —  and  so  on,  without 
€nd,  coupled  with  suggestions  for 
correcting  these  evils  such  as  remind 
a  historian  of  the  Lex  Poppaea  and 
the  Koman  Empire  rather  than  they 
prove  that  careless  confidence  in  itself 
which  ought  to  stamp  the  rapid  rise 
of  social  energy  which  everyone  asserts 
and  admits.  A  great  newspaper  opens 
the  discussion  of  a  social  reform  by 
the  axiom  that  "  there  are  unmistak- 
able signs  of  deterioration  in  the  race." 
The  County  Council  of  London  pub- 
lishes a  yearly  volume  of  elaborate 
statistics,    only   to   prove,    according   to 


THE  PEOBLEM  83 

the  London  Times,  that  "the  great 
city  of  today,"  of  which  Berlin  is  the 
most  significant  type,  *'  exhibits  a  con- 
stantly diminishing  vitality ; "  and,  in 
almost  the  same  breath,  other  journals 
exult  in  showing  that  the  globe  is 
rapidly  becoming  a  suburb  of  the  great 
cities.  Rarely  does  the  press  dwell  on 
proofs  of  social  evolution  except  as 
shown  negatively  in  decline  of  the 
death-rate,  or  of  illiteracy,  or  in  relief 
from  pain,  and  never  does  the  statis- 
tician or  sociologist  help  the  historian 
to  any  clear  understanding  of  the 
progress  expected  as  his  literary  goal. 
The  medical  profession  is  singularly 
shy  of  pledges.  The  poets  are  pessi-  J 
mists  to  a  man  —  and  to  a  woman. 
The  legislators  pass  half  their  time, 
in  Germany,  France  and  England, 
framing  social    legislation,   of  which   a 


84  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

large  part  rests  on  the  right  and  duty 
of  society  to  protect  itself  against  itself, 
not  under  the  fiction  of  elevating  itself 
from  lower  to  higher,  but  —  as  in  the 
case  of  alcohol  and  drugs,  —  to  protect 
itself  from  deterioration  by  the  exercise 
of  powers  analogous  to  the  power  of 
war. 

As  yet  the  press  is  alarmist  with 
decency,  even  in  Paris  and  Berlin,  but 
at  the  rate  of  progress  since  1870,  the 
press  might  soon  learn  to  blacken  the 
prospects  of  humanity  with  all  the 
picturesque  genius  of  Camille  Flam- 
mar  ion.  A  little  more  superficial 
knowledge  is  all  it  needs ;  the  general 
disposition  is  already  excellent.  Mean- 
while, the  teacher  of  history  has  fallen 
out  of  sight.  The  freedom  that  was 
liberally  extended  to  others  was  denied 
to  him.     Supposing  Kelvin's  law,  with 


THE  PROBLEM  85 

Lapparent's  conclusions,  and  Flamma- 
rion's  illustrations,  to  be  rigorously 
true,  and  that  its  truth  was  admitted 
in  biology  as  in  physics,  the  American 
professor  who  should  begin  his  annual 
course  by  announcing  to  his  class  that 
their  year's  work  would  be  devoted  to 
showing  in  American  history  ''  a  uni- 
versal tendency  to  the  dissipation  of 
energy "  and  degradation  of  thought, 
which  would  soon  end  in  making 
America  "  improper  for  the  habitation 
of  man  as  he  is  now  constituted," 
might  not  fear  the  fate  of  Giordano 
Bruno,  but  would  certainly  expect  that 
of  Galileo,  even  though  he  knew  that 
every  member  of  the  Cardinal's  College 
of  professors  held  the  same  opinion. 
The  University  would  have  to  protect 
itself  by  dismissing  him. 

The  truth  or  the  error  of  the   three 


86  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

Laws  of  Evolution  does  not  properly 
concern  the  teacher.  No  physicist  can, 
in  these  days,  be  expected  to  take 
oath  that  Dalton's  atoms,  or  Willard 
Gibbs's  phases,  or  Bernoulli's  kinetic 
gases,  are  true.  He  uses  for  his 
scholars  the  figure  or  the  formula 
which  best  suits  their  convenience. 
The  historian  or  sociologist  is  alone 
restricted  in  the  use  of  formulas  which 
shock  the  moral  sense;  yet  the  stop- 
^page  of  discussion  in  the  historical 
^  lecture-room  cannot  affect  the  teach- 
ing of  the  same  young  men  in  the 
physical  laboratory,  —  still  less  the 
legislation  of  their  parents  at  the 
State  capital ;  it  would  merely  ruin  the 
school  of  history.  However  much  to 
be  regretted  is  such  a  result,  society 
cannot  safely  permit  itself  to  be  con- 
demned to  a  lingering   death,  which  is 


THE   PEOBLEM  87 

sure  to  tend  towards  suicide,  merely  to 
suit  the  convenience  of  school-teachers. 
The   dilemma   is   real ;    it  may    become      / 
serious;    in    any   case    it    needs   to   be 
understood. 

The  battle  of  Evolution  has  never 
been  wholly  won ;  the  chances  at  this 
moment  favor  the  fear  that  it  may  yet 
be  wholly  lost.  The  Darwinist  no 
longer  talks  of  Evolution ;  he  uses  the 
word  Transformation.  The  historian  of 
human  society  has  hitherto,  as  a  habit, 
preferred  to  write  or  to  lecture  on  a 
tacit  assumption  that  humanity  showed 
upward  progress,  even  when  it  empha- 
tically showed  the  contrary,  as  was 
not  uncommon ;  but  this  passive  atti- 
tude cannot  be  held  against  the 
physicist  who  invades  his  territory  and 
takes  the  teaching  of  history  out  of 
his    hands.      Somewhere   he   will   have 


y 


88  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

to  make  a  stand,  but  he  has  been 
already  so  much  weakened  by  the 
surrender  of  his  defences  that  he  knows 
no  longer  where  a  stand  can  be  made. 
As  a  form  of  Vital  Energy  he  is  con- 
victed of  being  a  Vertebrate,  a  Mammal, 
a  Monodelphe,  a  Primate,  and  must 
eternally,  by  his  body,  be  subject  to 
the  second  law  of  thermodynamics. 
Escape  there  is  impossible.  Science 
has  shut  and  barred  every  known  exit. 
Man  can  detect  no  outlet  except 
through  the  loophole  called  Mind,  and 
even  to  avail  himself  of  this,  he  must 
follow  Lapparent's  advice,  —  become  a 
disembodied  spirit  and  seek  a  confed- 
erate among  such  physicists  or  physi- 
ologists as  are  willing  to  admit  that 
man,  as  an  animal,  has  no  import- 
ance ;  that  his  evolution  or  degradation 
as    an    organism    is    immaterial;    that 


THE  PEOBLEM  89 

his  physical  force  or  condition  has 
nothing  to  do  with  the  subject ;  that 
the  old  ascetics  were  correct  in  sup- 
pressing the  body ;  and  that  his  con- 
sciousness is  sufficient  proof  of  his  right 
to  regard  Keason  as  the  highest  poten- 
tial of  Vital  Energy. 

The  historian,  thrown  back  on  this 
oldest  of  battlegrounds,  may  console 
himself  with  the  thought  that  the 
physicists  and  physiologists  are  as 
much  embarrassed  as  himself ;  but 
while,  in  former  ages,  the  world  went 
on,  after  a  fashion,  trusting  to  the 
energy  of  its  archaic  instincts  to  make 
good  the  lapses  of  its  reasoning  powers, 
the  external  pressure  of  physical  forces, 
under  their  thermodynamic  laws,  seems 
of  late  to  have  literally  driven  physical 
science  into  an  assumption  of  universal 
authority,   so  that  physiologists  can  no 


(/ 


90  LETTEE  TO  TEACHERS 

longer  evade  the  logical  necessity  of 
framing  a  stem-history  for  the  mind, 
as  for  the  body  or  the  skeleton ;  and 
since  their  law  tends  strongly  towards 
monism,  —  unity  of  energy,  —  they  can- 
not supply  man  with  any  other  energies 
or  laws  than  he  inherited  from  his 
only  known  —  or  unknown  —  ancestor, 
the  hypothetical  eocene  lemur.  In  the 
system  of  Energetik,  Keason  can  be 
only  another  phase  of  the  energy 
earlier  known  as  Instinct  or  Intuition ; 
and  if  this  be  admitted  as  the  stem- 
history  of  the  Mind  as  far  back  as 
the  eocene  lemur,  it  must  be  admitted 
for  all  forms  of  Vital  Energy  back  to 
the  vegetables  and  perhaps  even  to  the 
crystals.  In  the  absence  of  any  definite 
break  in  the  series,  all  must  be  treated 
as  endowed  with  energy  equivalent 
to  will. 


THE  PEOBLEM  91 

The  idea  is  very  familiar  in  philoso- 
phy ;  the  strangeness  consists  in  its 
gaining  foothold  in  science.  At  the 
Congress  of  the  Italian  Society  for  the 
Progress  of  Sciences  held  at  Parma  in 
1907,  Ciamician,  the  distinguished 
Professor  of  the  University  of  Bologna, 
suggested  that  the  potential  of  Vital  '-^ 
Energy  should  be  taken  as  the  Will. 
The  step  seems  logical,  and  to  the 
historian  it  seems  natural.  The  idea  is 
as  old  as  Aristotle  ;  anyone  who  cares 
to  study  its  history  will  find  it  in 
Eduard  von  Hartmann's  "  Philosophic 
des  Unbewussten "  (Vol.  ii,  pp.  426- 
439,  Leipzig,  1904) ;  but,  for  the  actual 
uses  of  today,  the  story  goes  back  no 
further  than  to  Schopenhauer's  famous 
work,  "Die  Welt  als  Wille,"  which 
appeared  in  1819-1844.  Schopenhauer 
held  that  all  energy    in    nature,   latent 


92  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

or  active,  is  identical  with  Will.  Be- 
fore his  time, — he  claimed, — the  concept 
of  Will  was  included  in  the  concept 
of  Force;  he  reversed  the  order  on  the 
ground  that  the  unknown  should  be 
referred  to  the  known,  and  that  there- 
fore the  whole  universe  of  energy, 
known  or  unknown,  of  whatever  inten- 
sity or  volume,  should  be  brought  into 
the  category  of  intuition.  The  philoso- 
phers, even  when  rejecting  the  identity 
of  Will  with  Energy,  were  before  long 
busily  coquetting  with  the  idea,  which 
offered  extraordinary  charms  to  inven- 
tors of  systems.  For  the  historian, 
Schopenhauer's  method  had  the  double 
merit  of  logically  merging  the  two 
great  historical  schools  of  thought.  The 
old  idea  of  Form,  which  ruled  the 
philosophy  of  Aristotle  and  Thomas 
Aquinas,  slipped  readily  over   the  idea 


THE  PROBLEM  93 

of  Energy,  taught  by  Kelvin  and 
Clausius,  so  that  henceforward  it  mat- 
tered little  whether  the  schools,  in 
their  rage  for  nomenclature,  called  the 
result  "Will,"  or  "  Entelechy,"  or 
"  Dominant,"  or  "  Organic  Principle," 
or  "Trieb,"  or  "  Strebung,"  or  "In- 
tuition," or  "  Instinct,"  or  just  simply 
"  Force  "  as  of  old  ;  even  the  forbidden 
words  "  Creative  power  "  became  almost 
orthodox  science ;  in  any  case  the  logic 
of  "  Will  "  or  "  Energetik  "  impera- 
tively required  that  every  conception 
whatever,  involving  a  potential,  obliged 
ontologists  to  regard  the  will-power  of 
every  stem  as  the  source  of  variation 
in  the  branches,  and  to  admit,  as  a 
physical  necessity,  that  the  branch 
which  has  lost  the  power  of  variation 
should  be  regarded  as  an  example  of 
enfeebled  energy  falling  under  the 
second  law  of  thermodynamics. 


V 


94  LETTEK  TO  TEACHERS 

Such,  an  arrangement,  however  con- 
venient for  degradationists,  and  however 
tempting  to  students  of  palaeontology 
in  particular,  is  likely  to  bring  trouble 
on  other  branches  of  education.  Espe- 
cially for  human  history  its  bearings 
are  painfully  pointed.  Already  the 
anthropologists  have  admitted  man  to 
be  specialised  beyond  the  hope  of 
further  variation,  so  that,  as  an  energy, 
he  must  be  treated  as  a  weakened 
Will,  —  an  enfeebled  vitality,  —  a  de- 
graded potential.  He  cannot  himself 
deny  that  his  highest  Will-power, 
whether  individual  or  social,  must 
have  proved  itself  by  his  highest 
variation,  which  was  incontrovertibly 
his  act  of  transforming  himself  from  a 
hypothetical  eocene  lemur,  —  whatever 
such  a  creature  may  have  been,  —  into 
a  man  speaking  an  elaborately  inflected 


THE  PROBLEM  95 

language.  This  staggering  but  self- 
evident  certainty  requires  many  phases 
of  weakening  Will-power  to  intervene 
in  the  process  of  subsidence  into  the 
reflective,  hesitating,  relatively  passive 
stage  called  Reason ;  so  that  in  the 
end,  if  the  biologists  insist  on  imposing 
their  law  on  the  anthropologists,  while 
at  the  same  time  refusing  to  admit  a 
break  in  the  series,  the  historian  will 
have  to  define  his  profession  as  the 
science  of  human  degradation.  The 
law  of  thermodynamics  must  embrace 
human  history  in  its  last  as  well  as  in 
its  earliest  phase.  If  the  physicist  can 
suggest  any  plausible  way  of  escaping 
this  demonstration,  either  logically  or 
by  mathematics,  he  will  confer  a  great 
benefit  on  history ;  but,  pending  his 
decision,  if  the  highest  Will-power  is 
conceded    to   have  existed   first,  and  if 


96  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

the  physicist  is  to  be  granted  his  pos- 
tulate that  height  and  intensity  are 
equivalent  terms,  while  fall  and  diifusion 
are  equivalent  to  degradation,  then  the 
intenser  energy  of  Will  which  showed 
itself  in  the  primitive  extravagance  of 
variation  for  which  Darwin  tried  so 
painfully  to  account  by  uniformitarian 
formulas,  must  have  been  —  and  must 
be  now  in  the  constant  process  of 
being  —  degraded  and  lost,  and  can 
never  be  recovered.  The  process,  in 
physics,  is   not   reversible. 

If  the  historian  of  human  society 
is  to  let  himself  be  placed  in  this 
position,  the  fact  should  be  under- 
stood and  accepted  in  advance.  In 
that  case,  two  schools  of  history  can 
be  easily  organised;  but  the  effect 
on  other  branches  of  instruction  is 
not   so  simple.     Ciamician's  suggestion, 


THE  PEOBLEM  97 

—  like  Schopenliauer's,  like  Nietzsche's, 
like  Eduard  von  Hartmann's  philoso- 
phy, —  does,  no  doubt,  threaten  human 
history  with  fantastic  revolution,  but 
perhaps  its  strangest  result  is  that  of 
converting  metaphysics  into  a  branch 
of  physics.  Nothing  in  the  history  of 
philosophy  is  more  distinctly  marked 
than  the  eifort  of  physics  and  meta- 
physics, since  1890,  to  approach  each 
other.  Only  a  specialist  knows  even 
the  titles  of  the  books  on  this  subject, 
in  the  German  language  alone  ;  but  a 
beginner  might  perhaps  try  to  get  an 
idea  of  the  process  from  Wilhelm 
Wundt's  well-known  "System  der 
Philosophie,"  (Leipzig,  1897).  The 
naturalist  now  readily  admits  that  plants 
have  souls  —  or  will-power,  —  but  he 
appropriates  the  soul  as  an  energy  of 
thermodynamics.  At  first  sight,  the 
7 


98  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

tendency  seems  towards  metaphysics, 
but  the  true  current  is  the  reverse. 
The  chaos  is  more  chaotic  than  ever, 
but  the  effort  to  make  the  laws  of 
Eiuergetih  cover  all,  is  perhaps  the 
only  very  vigorous  intellectual  activity 
now   in   evidence. 

Both  parties  have  in  consequence 
appealed  to  the  Psychologists,  and, 
under  the  lead  of  Ostwald  in  Germany 
and  of  Loeb  in  America,  have  created, 
within  the  last  few  years,  a  new  litera- 
ture so  extensive  as  to  defy  all  students 
except  advanced  specialists.  Indeed, 
almost  as  in  mathematics,  the  specialist 
himself  is  rarely  equal  to  his  task. 
Every  country  in  the  world  is  con- 
tributing to  the  pursuit  of  psychological 
laws.  In  Russia,  Krainsky's  volume 
on  the  "  Law  of  Conservation  of 
Energy  applied  to  Psychical  Activity  " 


THE  PEOBLEM  99 

appeared  as  long  ago  as  the  year  1897. 
The  amount  of  intelligence  and  patient 
research  put  into  the  investigation  is  as 
great  as  though  wealth  were  its  end ; 
and,  though  the  drift  of  evidence  may 
seem  to  a  historian  both  clear  and 
strong,  he  has,  as  yet,  no  right  to 
hamper  the  inquiry  by  inflicting  on 
these  exceedingly  clever  and  earnest 
seekers  any  inquiries  of  his  own.  At 
most,  in  his  desperate  search  for  allies 
to  protect  him  from  the  tyranny  of 
thermodynamics,  he  might  timidly  ask, 
not  them  but  himself,  whether  the  new  w' 
psychology  tends  towards  the  possibility 
that  Reason  may  be  a  more  or  less 
remote  consequence  of  Tropism,  —  that 
is  to  say,  a  form  of  motion  excited  by 
exterior  forces.  In  itself,  this  old  and 
very  familiar  theory,  that  "  nous  vivons 
parceque   nous  sommes   excites,"    is   as 


100  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

indifferent  to  sociologists  as  any  other 
physico-chemical  or  mechanical  analogy 
used  for  purposes  of  technical  instruc- 
tion ;  but  if  it  goes  to  the  point  of 
asserting,  as  an  acquired  truth,  that 
the  motion  of  the  mind  is  an  induced 
motion  which  follows  the  laws  of 
electricity,  the  historian  of  mind  in 
its  social  variety  will  find  himself 
seriously  embarrassed.  Without  going 
back  to  the  earlier  discussion  of  this 
burning  question,  an  inquirer  may 
allow  himself  to  quote  the  latest  form 
in  which  the  distinguished  chief  of 
the  school  states  it.  Ostwald  says :  — 
"  Between  psychological  and  mechan- 
ical operations,  there  seems  to  be 
nearly  the  same  difference  and  the 
same  resemblance,  as  between  electric 
and  chemical  operations."  ("  L'Ener- 
gie."      Paris,  1910,  p.   210).      On  this 


THE  PROBLEM  101 

question,  Loeb  is  even  a  higher  author- 
ity than  Ostwald,  and  his  latest  expres- 
sions are  still  more  emphatic.  He 
recognises  no  such  thing  as  Will :  —  "It 
seems  to  me,"  he  says,  ''  that  it  is  in 
the  interest  of  psychology  itself  to  / 
favor  the  development  of  the  theory 
of  tropisms " ;  and  not  of  tropisms 
alone  ;  —  "  My  object  is  to  refer  psychi- 
cal phenomena  not  only  to  tropisms 
but  also  to  physico-chemical  j^heno- 
mena."  ("  La  Revue  des  Idees,"  October 
15,  1909).  With  the  utmost  ingenuity 
and  labor  he  has  proved  that,  at  least 
in  many  low  organisms,  what  is  taken  / 
for  Will  is  really  mechanical  attraction. 
Loeb's  demonstrations  are  quite  beau- 
tiful pieces  of  work  which  rouse  high 
admiration  for  his  powers ;  but  their 
bearing  on  his  colleagues  is  obscure. 
If  Thought  is  capable  of  being  classed 


V 


J 


102  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

with  Electricity,  or  Will  with  chemical 
affinity,  as  a  mode  of  motion,  it  seems 
necessarily  to  fall  at  once  under  the 
second  law  of  thermodynamics  as  one  of 
the  energies  which  most  easily  degrades 
itself,  and,  if  not  carefully  guarded, 
returns  bodily  to  the  cheaper  form 
called  Heat.  Of  all  possible  theories, 
this  is  likely  to  prove  the  most  fatal 
to  Professors  of  History. 

The  dilemma  is  pointed  out  by  Dr. 
Hanna  Thomson,  in  his  book  on  the 
Brain,  with  the  emphasis  that  suits  its 
tension  : — "  Physically  the  gap  between 
the  brain  of  man  and  the  brain  of  an 
anthropoid  ape  is  too  insignificant  to 
count ;  but  their  difference  as  beings 
corresponds  to  the  distance  of  the  earth 
from  the  nearest  fixed  star.  The  brain 
of  man  does  not  account  for  man  ? 
What  does?" 


THE  PEOBLEM  103 

The  question,  tlius  bluntly  posed,  is  \/ 
bluntly  answered  in  a  sense  hostile 
to  the  physicist  law.  The  brain  is 
developed  by  the  Will,  which  lies  within 
and  behind  the  brain  : — "  By  practice 
.  .  .  the  Will-stimulus  will  not  only 
organise  brain-centres  to  perform  new 
functions,  but  will  project  new  connect- 
ing,— or,  as  they  are  technically  called, 
association  —  fibres,  which  will  make 
nerve-centres  work  together  as  they 
could  not,  without  being  thus  associated." 
The  motive-power  is  not  of  the  brain, 
"because  it  is  the  masterful  personal 
Will  which  makes  the  brain  human " 
by  developing  one  of  the  brain-hemi- 
spheres ;  and  "  this  Something  known 
as  Will  "  continues  Dr.  Hanna  Thomson, 
"  is  not  natural,  but  supernatural,  both 
in  its  powers  and  in  its  creations." 

Of  course  the  supernatural  character 


104  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

of  the  will  is  the  whole  point  in  dispute, 
and  the  usual  doctrine  of  the  modern 
psychologist  substitutes  the  word  Nature 
for  the  word  Supernatural.  Thus  Paul 
Flechsig,  concluding  his  address  to  the 
Psychological  Congress  in  Rome  (1905), 
says  that  "  only  by  constant,  progressive 
changes  in  the  physical  form  of  the 
brain,  has  Nature  succeeded  in  attaining 
this  truly  lofty  end.  Thus  the  Will 
shows  organic  evolution  from  first  to 
last,  and  shows  in  this  respect  no  differ- 
ence from  other  bodily  functions.  It  is 
a  product  of  organic  nature,  and,  at 
least  in  its  broadest  sense,  bears  that 
stamp." 

The  three  views  seem  far  apart,  and 
yet  one  can  conceive  that  Kelvin,  who 
troubled  himself  only  with  the  practical 
means  of  obtaining  a  fall  of  potential 
equivalent  to  the  work  done,  might  have 


THE  PROBLEM  105 

seen  no   necessary  contradiction   to   his 
law  in  either  case : — 

"  Quite  so  !  "  he  might  be  supposed 
to  reply  ;  "  the  force  that  Thomson  calls 
supernatural  Will,  and  Flechsig  calls 
an  organic  function,  and  Loeb  calls  a 
physico-chemical  relation,  is  the  force 
which  I  call  vital  Energy,  and  which 
I  agree  with  Dr.  Thomson  in  regarding 
as  supernatural  in  the  sense  that  nature 
no  longer  produces  it  here,  more  than 
she  produces  any  other  element  or  atom. 
Physicists  are  at  perfect  liberty  to  regard 
the  Will  as  another  name  for  the 
same  primitive,  elementary,  unexplained 
energy  which  gave  odor  to  a  molecule 
of  copper,  or  made  the  magnolia  burst 
into  flower  with  more  than  animal 
sensuality  and  perfection  of  form,  color, 
scent,  and  line ;  or  the  caterpillar  sud- 
denly soar  into  the  air  with  the  amazing, 


106  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

inconceivable  sensual  properties  of  the 
butterfly ;  but  the  mere  brain-mechanism 
you  talk  about  is,  in  physics,  far  less 
extraordinary,  as  Will,  than  what  went 
before  it,  —  creations  always  growing 
higher  in  tension  as  you  go  backward, — 
like  the  eye,  or  the  innumerable  varie- 
ties or  transformations  of  the  shapes 
which  vital  energy  has  taken  in  every 
province  of  the  vegetable  and  animal 
kingdoms,  while  all  are  still  subordinate 
and  even  trivial  when  compared  with 
the  primary  creation  of  energy  itself, 
about  which  no  one  knows  anything 
except  its  name, — Nature." 

Such  reasoning  in  circles  helps  the 
historian  little  to  make  headway 
against  the  current  of  physical  energies. 
His  dilemma  remains  untouched.  The 
physicist  says  that  Thought  is  an 
organic  growth  which    has    the  faculty 


THE  PKOBLEM  107 

of   determining    its    own   action  within 
certain   limits,    but   whose    "  Freedom " 
exists  only  in  the  atmosphere  of  ideals. 
By     the     majority     of     physiologists, 
Thought    seems    to    be     regarded  —  at 
present  —  as   a   more   or   less    degraded 
Act,  —  an  enfeebled  function  of  Will : — 
"Thou2;ht    comes    as    the    result    of 
helplessness,"     says     Lalande     in     his 
volume  on  "Dissolution"  (Paris,  1899, 
p.    166) ;    "  Thought,  as    Bain    says,    is 
the   refraining    from    speech    or   action. 
The    truth    is,    therefore,    that    action 
comes  first ;    the    idea   is  an  act  which 
tends  to  accomplish    itself,   and  which, 
when   stopped  by  some  obstacle  before 
its    realisation,    finds    a    new    form    of 
reality  in  that  stoppage.      Jean  Jacques 
Bousseau   said :   '  The  man  who   thinks 
is  a  depraved  animal ' ;    and  in  this  he 
expressed  an  exact  view  of  psychology. 


V 


108  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

As  far  as  he  is  animal,  the  thinker  is 
a  bad  animal ;  eating  badly ;  digesting 
badly ;  often  dying  without  posterity. 
In  him  the  degradation  of  vital  energy 
is  flagrant.  (La  depravation  de  la 
nature  physique  est  visible  chez  lui)." 
The  late  volume  of  M.  Bergson, 
"  L'Evolution  Creatrice,"  is  the  most 
widely  known  among  the  very  latest 
efforts  of  metaphysicians  to  defend 
their  conceptions  against  the  methods 
of  physics  ;  and  yet,  on  this  point  cf 
Keason  and  Instinct,  M.  Bergson  seems 
ready  to  go  further  than  M.  Lalande. 
The  whole  chapter  on  Instinct  ought 
to  be  read,  and  studied  in  connection 
with  the  treatment  of  the  same  subject 
by  Reinke,  in  his  "  Einleitung "  (Kap. 
21),  and  the  source  of  it  all  in  Eduard 
von  Hartmann's  "  Unbewusste,"  but  a 
few    paragraphs   will  serve    to    express 


THE  PKOBLEM  109 

the  present  views  of  the  College  de 
France  about  the  relative  value  of 
phases  of  life  as  forces :  — 

"  From  our  point  of  view,  life  appears 
globally  as  an  immense  wave  which 
starts  from  a  centre  to  propagate  itself 
outwards,  and  which  is  arrested  at 
almost  every  point  of  its  circumference, 
and  is  converted  into  oscillation  without 
advance ;  at  one  point  alone,  it  has 
forced  the  obstacle,  and  the  impulse  has 
passed  on  freely.  This  liberty  is  regis- 
tered in  the  form  of  man.  Everywhere 
except  with  man,  consciousness  has  been 
brought  to  a  stop ;  with  man  alone  it 
has  pursued  its  road.  ...  In  doing  so, 
it  is  true,  it  has  abandoned  not  merely 
the  baggage  that  embarrassed  it,  but 
has  been  obliged  to  renounce  also  some 
precious  properties.  Consciousness,  in 
man,  is   chiefly  intelligeiice.     It  might 


110  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

have  been,  —  it  seems  as  though  it 
ought  to  have  been, — intuition  too.  .  .  . 
Another  evolution  might  have  led  to  a 
humanity  either  still  more  intelligent, 
or  more  intuitive.  In  reality,  in  the 
humanity  of  which  we  make  part,  intu- 
ition is  almost  completely  sacrificed  to 
intelligence.  .  .  .  Intuition  is  still  there, 
but  vague,  and  especially  discontinuous. 
It  is  a  lamp,  almost  extinguished,  which 
gains  strength  at  long  intervals,  where 
a  vital  interest  is  at  hasard,  but  only 
for  a  few  instants.  On  our  personality, 
on  our  liberty,  on  the  place  we  occupy 
in  nature  as  a  whole,  on  our  origin,  and 
perhaps  also  on  our  destiny  it  casts  a 
feeble  and  flickering  light,  but  a  light 
which  pierces,  none  the  less,  the  dark- 
ness of  the  night  in  which  our  intelli- 
gence leaves  us  "  (pp.  288-289). 

If  this  is  the  best    that   physiology 


THE  PKOBLEM  111 

and  metapliysics  can  do  to  help  the 
historian  of  man,  the  outlook  is  far 
from  cheerful.  The  historian  is  re-  ./ 
quired  either  expressly  to  assert,  or 
surreptitiously  to  assume,  before  his 
students,  that  the  whole  function  of 
nature  has  been  the  ultimate  produc- 
tion of  this  one-sided  Consciousness, — 
this  amputated  Intelligence,  —  this  de- 
graded Act,  —  this  truncated  Will.  As 
the  function  of  the  crystal  is  to  produce 
the  order  of  its  cleavage,  and  that 
of  the  rose,  the  beauty  of  its  flower, 
and  that  of  the  peacock,  the  splendors 
of  its  tail,  and  as,  except  for  these 
purposes,  neither  crystal,  rose  nor 
peacock  has  as  much  human  interest 
as  a  thistle  or  a  maggot,  so  the  func- 
tion of  man  is,  to  the  historian,  the  'J 
production  of  Thought ;  but  if  all  the 
other  sciences  affirm  that  not  Thought 


■^ 


112  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

but  Instinct  is  the  potential  of  Vital 
Energy,  and  if  the  beauties  of  Thought 
—  shown  in  the  intuitions  of  artistic 
genius,  —  are  to  be  taken  for  the  last 
traces  of  an  instinct  now  wholly  dead 
or  dying,  nothing  remains  for  the 
historian  to  describe  or  develop  except 
the  history  of  a  more  or  less  mechani- 
cal dissolution.  The  mere  act  of 
reproduction,  which  seems  to  have 
been  the  most  absorbing  and  passionate 
purpose  of  primitive  instinct,  concerns 
history  not  at  all,  except  as  the 
botanist  is  concerned  with  the  question 
whether  the  flower  is  a  developed 
or  degraded  leaf;  but  the  question 
whether  the  plant  exists  to  produce 
the  flower,  or  to  produce  the  leaf,  is 
vital.  The  University,  as  distinct  from 
the  technological  school,  has  no  proper 
function    other   than   to  teach  that  the 


THE  PKOBLEM  113 

flower  of  vital  energy  is  Thought, 
and  that  not  Instinct  but  Intellect  is 
the  highest  power  of  a  supernatural 
Will ;  —  an  ultimate,  independent,  self- 
producing,  self-sustaining,  incorruptible 
solvent  of  all  earlier  or  lower  energies, 
and  incapable  of  degradation  or  disso- 
lution. 

Intellect  should  bear  the  same  relation 
to  Instinct  that  the  sun  bears  to  a 
gaseous  nebula,  and  hitherto  in  human 
history  it  has  asserted  this  relation 
without  a  doubt  of  its  self-evident  truth. 
The  assertion  has  led  to  physical 
violence  and  intellectual  extravagance 
without  limit,  so  that  history  shows 
man  as  alternately  insane  with  his  own 
pride  of  intellect,  and  shuddering  with 
horror  at  its  bloody  consequences ;  but 
the  remains  of  primitive  instinct  taught 
society  that  it  could  not  abandon  its 
8 


114  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

claim  to  be,  or  to  represent,  a  super- 
natural and  independent  energy,  with- 
out, by  the  same  act,  admitting  and 
demonstrating  its  progressive  enfeeble- 
ment  of  will.  If  Intellect  led  to  such 
an  abdication,  it  proved  the  universal 
truth  of  the  second  thermodynamic 
law. 

Prom  the  beginnings  of  philosophy 
and  religion,  the  thinker  was  taught 
by  the  mere  act  of  thinking,  to  take 
for  granted  that  his  mind  was  the 
highest  energy  of  nature.  Society  still 
believes  it,  and  asserts  its  supremacy, 
on  no  other  ground,  with  a  sustained 
force  which  is  the  chief  theme  of 
history,  and  which  showed  no  sign 
of  relaxation  until  attacked  in  the 
eighteenth  century  in  its  theological  or 
supernatural  outposts.  Society  must 
still    continue   to   act    upon    it,    as    the 


THE  PROBLEM  115 

Platonist,  the  Stoic  and  the  Christian 
did,  for  the  obvious  reason  that  it 
was  and  is  their  only  motive  for 
existence,  —  their  solitary  title  to  their 
identity. 

History  has  never  regarded  itself 
as  a  science  of  statistics.  It  was  the 
Science  of  Vital  Energy  in  relation 
with  time ;  and  of  late  this  radiating 
centre  of  its  life  has  been  steadily 
tending,  —  together  with  every  form  of 
physical  and  mechanical  energy,  — 
towards  mathematical  expression.  The 
torrent  of  physical  energy  has  swept 
society  into  its  course,  until  every 
school,  and  almost  every  teacher  in  the 
world,  —  except  perhaps  in  the  Church, 
—  takes  an  attitude  of  instinctive  and 
silent  hostility  to  any  form  of  energy 
that  claims  to  be  independent.  Even 
though   the   triumph   of    this    teaching 


116  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

is  the  ultimate  degradation  of  the 
energy  that  is  taught,  —  of  the  teacher 
as  well  as  of  the  pupil  and  the 
universe,  —  and  the  more  complete  his 
.  /  victory,  the  more  rapid  his  degradation, 
the  fault  is  not  his  that  the  radiating 
centre  of  his  world  should  hetray  this 
visible  decline  of  vigor. 

Very  unwillingly  can  he  admit 
Reason  to  be  an  energy  at  all ;  at  the 
utmost,  he  can  hardly  allow  it  to  be 
more  than  a  passive  instrument  of  a 
physico-chemical  energy  called  Will ; — 
an  ingenious  economy  in  the  appli- 
cation of  power ;  a  catalytic  medium  ; 
a  dynamo,  mysteriously  converting  one 
form  of  energy  into  a  lower  ;  —  but  if 
persuaded  to  concede  the  intrinsic  force 
of  Reason,  he  must  still  reject  its  inde- 
pendence. As  a  force,  it  must  obey  the 
laws   of  force ;    as   an    energy    it   must 


THE  PROBLEM  117 

content  itself  with  such  freedom  as  the 
laws  of  energy  allow ;  and  in  any  case 
it  must  submit  to  the  final  and  funda- 
mental necessity  of  Degradation. 

The     same    law,    by    still     stronger 
reasoning,  applies  to  the  Will  itself. 


CHAPTER   II 
THE   SOLUTIONS 


The  general  reader,  though  apt  to 
mistake  the  drift  of  thought,  is  still 
rather  a  better  judge  of  it  than  the 
specialist  can  be,  and  he  gets,  from  the 
literature  of  the  twentieth  century  in 
its  first  decade,  a  decided  impression 
that  educational  energy  has  passed  into 
the  hands  of  the  physico-chemists  and 
teachers  of  Energetik  or  thermody- 
namics. The  old  Law  of  Conservation, 
or  mechanics,  still  rules  in  the  work- 
shop, but  is  somewhat  lifeless  in  the 
scholars  if  not  in  the  schools.  Its 
teachers  seem  rather  inactive,  or  even 
indifferent ;  yet  possibly,  here  and  there, 

119 


120  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

one  of  them  may  feel  uneasy  at  the 
prospect  of  actually  commg  to  blows 
with  his  brother-professors  as  in  the 
old  days  of  religion.  The  Law  of  Con- 
servation was  an  easy  one ;  it  left  a 
reasonable  share  of  freedom  in  the 
universe ;  even  astronomers  were  allowed 
to  be  devout,  and  sometimes  actually 
were  so  ;  while  in  strictness,  physicists 
cease  to  be  physicists  unless  they  hold 
that  the  law  of  Entropy  includes  Gods 
and  men  as  well  as  universes.  Never- 
theless even  a  physicist  may  occasionally 
bear  in  patience  with  perfectly  impartial, 
and,  though  conservative,  yet  not 
unsympathetic  bystanders,  who  try  to 
act  as  though  the  door  were  still  open, 
and  who  beg  only  to  be  told  what  the 
new  physicists  are  willing  to  do  for 
mankind.  What  mankind  will  do  for 
itself    is    quite    another    matter,    since 


THE  SOLUTIONS  121 

probably  all  teachers  admit  that,  in 
daily  life,  society  may  go  on  indefinitely, 
quite  as  well, — or  as  ill, — in  the  future 
as  in  the  past ;  but  as  between  schools 
of  education  the  divergence  is  wide. 
Possibly  the  Universities  may  think  it 
safer  to  ignore  the  dilemma  for  another 
decade  or  two,  as  they  have  ignored  so 
many  others ;  but  they  would  do  better 
to  reach  an  understanding  if  they  can, 
especially  because,  if  both  parties  could 
be  brought  into  some  slight  sacrifice  of 
principle,  and  so  abate  the  rigor  of 
their  law,  the  compromise  might  put 
new  life  into  the  school  of  history,  which 
badly  needs  it. 

For  purposes  of  teaching,  the  figure 
is  alone  essential,  and  the  figure  of  Rise 
and  Fall  has  done  infinite  harm  from 
the  beginnings  of  thought.  That  of 
Expansion  and  Contraction  is  far  more 


122  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

scientific,  even  in  history.  Evolution, 
again,  is  troublesome,  and  has  already 
yielded  to  the  less  compromising  figure 
of  Transformation.  Expansion  and 
Transformation  are  words  which  commit 
teachers  to  no  inconvenient  dogma ; 
indeed,  they  are  so  happily  adapted  for 
Galileos  who  are  wise  enough  not  to 
shock  opinion,  that  they  seem  to  impose 
themselves  on  the  lecture-room.  In 
strictness,  no  doubt,  water  which  falls 
and  dynamite  which  expands,  are 
equally  degraded  energies,  but  the  mind 
is  repelled  by  the  idea  of  degradation, 
while  it  is  pleased  by  the  figure  of 
expansion.  Because  an  energy  is 
diffused  like  table-salt  in  water,  it  is 
not  rendered  less  useful ;  on  the  con- 
trary, it  can  only  by  that  process  be 
made  useful  at  all  to  an  animal  like 
man  whose  life  is   shut  within  narrow 


THE  SOLUTIONS  123 

limits  of  intensity ;  who  sends  for  a 
physician  if  his  temperature  rises  a 
single  degree,  and  who  dies  if  it  rises 
or  falls  5°  Centigrade  ;  whose  bath  must 
be  tempered  and  his  alcohol  diluted ; 
and  whose  highest  ambition  is  to  train 
and  temper  his  own  brute  energies  to 
obey  law.  Notoriously  civilisation  and 
education  enfeeble  personal  energy ; 
emollit  mores :  they  aim  especially  at 
extending  the  forces  of  society  at  cost 
of  the  intensity  of  individual  forces. 
"  Thou  shalt  not,"  is  the  beginning  of 
law.  The  individual,  like  the  crystal 
of  salt,  is  absorbed  in  the  solution,  but 
the  solution  does  work  which  the  indi- 
vidual could  not  do. 

Put  in  this  form  the  law  of  thermo- 
dynamics seems  less  obnoxious.  With 
the  change  of  one  word  to  another, 
the    most    sensitive    evolutionist   might 


124  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

not  refuse  a  hearing  to  the  physicist 
who  should  affirm  that  organic  as  well 
as  inorganic  nature  shows  a  universal 
tendency  to  the  dissipation  of  energy. 
At  the  utmost,  the  Evolutionist  would 
need  only  to  point  out  that  nature, 
contrary  to  her  usually  wasteful  habits, 
often  teaches  extreme  economy,  as 
when  she  locks  up  her  energies  in 
atoms  and  molecules,  or,  what  is  more 
to  man's  purpose,  when  she  trains 
the  glow-worm  to  habits  of  costless 
industry  that  may  well  make  the  sun 
veil  its  face ;  but,  consenting  to  pass 
over,  for  the  moment,  this  restriction 
on  thermodynamic  extravagance,  the 
Darwinian  will  perhaps  for  the  sake 
of  harmony,  concede  that,  however 
economical  the  process  may  be  in  its 
details,  dissipation  of  energy  is  always 
occurring  in  the  mass,  and  that  nature 


THE  SOLUTIONS  125 

shows  no  known  machinery  for  restor- 
ing the  energy  which  she  dissipates. 
If  the  physiologists  insist  on  this 
concession,  the  Darwinian  may  perhaps, 
by  way  of  reaching  an  issue,  content 
himself  with  allowing  it,  with  only  a 
single,  but  serious,  restriction. 

This  single  restriction  concerns  the 
limitations  of  science  itself,  which  has 
thus  far  penetrated  only  the  grosser 
operations  of  nature,  and  cannot  deny 
that  further  knowledge  may  —  and 
probably  will  — overthrow  much  of  the 
experience  of  physics.  This  possibil- 
ity is  constantly  discussed  by  the  most 
eminent  physicists,  and  is  open  to 
endless  discussion  by  physiologists ;  but 
since  it  is  the  last  ground  on  which 
the  Darwinian  can  make  a  stand,  he 
will  do  well  to  reserve  it,  on  the 
chance  that  new  scientific  horizons  will 
open  to  him. 


126  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

Supposing,  then,  that  the  physicist 
takes  the  lead,  and  seeks  for  a  means 
of  compromise,  —  some  middle  term, 
on  which  the  elevationist  can  stand 
while  discussing  the  details  of  a  treaty ! 
The  degradationist  can  produce  from 
his  stores  of  energy  a  number  of 
figures  for  choice;  —  such  as  that  of 
water,  which  expands  or  contracts, 
according  to  the  temperature,  or  falls 
according  to  its  position ;  or  electricity, 
which  dissipates  itself  in  work ;  or  of 
dynamite  which  does  work  by  explo- 
sion ;  or  of  gases  which  work  restlessly 
without  accomplishing  anything ;  or 
of  table-salt,  which  dissolves  mysteri- 
ously in  water,  to  help  digestion  or 
stimulate  appetite ;  but  possibly  he 
may  begin  with  his  favorite  figure  of 
a  gaseous  nebula,  and  may  offer  to  treat 
primitive    humanity    as    a    volume    of 


THE  SOLUTIONS  127 

hiuman  molecules  of  unequal  intensities, 
tending  to  dissipate  energy,  and  to 
correct  the  loss  by  concentrating  man- 
kind into  a  single,  dense  mass  like  the 
sun.  History  would  then  become  a 
record  of  successive  phases  of  contrac- 
tion, divided  by  periods  of  explosion, 
tending  always  towards  an  ultimate 
equilibrium  in  the  form  of  a  volume  of 
human  molecules  of  equal  intensity, 
without  coordination. 

If  this  analogy,  with  its  law  of  phases, 
should  be  rejected,  the  physicist  might 
still  offer  a  number  of  others,  likening 
social  energy  to  light,  heat,  electricity 
or  radiating  matter  ;  —  in  short  to  any 
form  of  physical  energy,  provided  it 
obeyed  his  second  law  of  thermody- 
namics, by  dissipating  itself  beyond 
recovery  ;  but,  with  the  utmost  good- 
will,  the  evolutionist   will   find  himself 


128  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

much  embarrassed  to  accept  any  of 
these  offers.  If  he  is  to  remain  evolu- 
tionist, —  and  he  has  no  other  motive 
for  existence,  —  he  is  forced  to  assert, 
as  his  most  modest  claim,  the  concession 
of  two  points :  —  1.  That  organic  life 
has  the  exclusive  power  of  economising 
nature's  waste.  —  2.  That  man  alone 
enjoys  the  supernatural  power  of  con- 
sciously reversing  nature's  process,  by 
raising  her  dissipated  energies,  including 
his  own,  to  higher  intensities.  That  is 
to  say,  man  must  possess  the  exclusive 
power  of  reversing  the  process  of 
extinction  ipherent  in  other  activities 
of  nature.  The  mere  conservation  of 
energy  would  not  be  enough  for  him, 
whatever  it  is  for  the  glow-worm. 

The  physicist  cannot  for  a  moment 
be  expected  to  grant  either  of  these 
demands,    and    is    quite    likely   to    be 


THE  SOLUTIONS  129 

irritated  by  them  even  to  the  point 
of  flatly  denying  any  exclusive  privi- 
leges to  organic  life  except  in  its 
processes.  He  is  capable  of  going  on 
to  question  the  value  of  the  processes 
too,  especially  on  the  point  of  economy, 
and  of  asserting  that  organisms  are 
bad  economists  compared  with  inorganic 
matter.  He  will  readily  admit  that 
some  of  the  lower  forms  of  life  are 
economists:  —  the  honey-bee,  for  exam- 
ple ;  and  some  caterpillars  which  store 
silk,  and  the  coral  i^olyp  which  stores 
lime,  and  so  forth  ;  but  the  vegetables 
do  much  better,  with  their  starch  and 
chlorophyl  and  carbon,  while  the  ocean 
and  the  atmosphere  do  better  still  by 
storing  heat  on  an  enormous  scale, 
and  distributing  it  where  man  needs 
it ;  many  natural  minerals  store  heat 
and  light  and  electricity,  and  part 
9 


130  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

with  them  for  man's  uses ;  the  earth 
itself  is  supposed  to  be  a  store  house 
of  energy ;  and  the  sun  is  admitted 
to  have  stored  all  sorts  of  energy  in 
almost  infinite  volume,  for  no  other 
known,  intelligent  use  than  the  pur- 
poses of  man.  Further,  steel  stores 
elastic  energy  better  than  any  vegetable 
life  can  do  it;  every  molecule  stores 
cohesive  energy  better  than  any  animal 
life  does  it ;  while  all  intelligent  people 
are  still  staring,  with  stupid  bewilder- 
ment, at  the  storage  power  of  an  atom 
of  radium.  Matter  indeed,  is  energy 
itself,  and  its  economies  first  made 
organic  life  possible  by  thus  correcting 
nature's  tendency  to  waste. 

Even  less  can  the  physicist  admit 
that  man  alone  enjoys  the  sujDernatural 
power  of  consciously  reversing  nature's 
processes,  and  of  restoring  her  dissipated 


THE  SOLUTIONS  131 

energies  to  their  lost  intensity.  From 
the  physicist's  point  of  view,  Man,  as  a 
conscious  and  constant,  single,  natural 
force,  seems  to  have  no  function  except 
that  of  dissipating  or  degrading  energy. 
Indeed,  the  evolutionist  himself  has 
complained,  and  is  still  complaining  in 
accents  which  grow  shriller  every  day, 
that  man  does  more  to  dissipate  and 
waste  nature's  economies  than  all  the 
rest  of  animal  or  vegetable  life  has  ever 
done  to  save  them.  "  Already," — one 
may  hear  the  physicists  aver  —  ''man 
dissipates  every  year  all  the  heat  stored 
in  a  thousand  million  tons  of  coal  which 
nature  herself  cannot  now  replace,  and 
he  does  this  only  in  order  to  convert 
some  ten  or  fifteen  per  cent,  of  it  into 
mechanical  energy  immediately  wasted 
on  his  transient  and  commonly  purpose- 
less objects.     He  draws  great  reservoirs 


132  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

of  coal-oil  and  gas  out  of  the  earth, 
which  he  consumes  like  the  coal.  He 
is  digging  out  even  the  peat-bogs  in 
order  to  consume  them  as  heat.  He 
has  largely  deforested  the  planet,  and 
hastened  its  desiccation.  He  seizes  all 
the  zinc  and  whatever  other  minerals 
he  can  burn,  or  which  he  can  convert 
into  other  forms  of  energy,  and  dissipate 
into  space.  His  consumption  of  oxygen 
would  be  proportionate  to  his  waste  of 
heat.  He  startles  and  shocks  even 
himself,  in  his  rational  moments,  by  his 
extravagance,  as  in  his  armies  and 
armaments  which  are  made  avowedly 
for  no  other  purpose  than  to  dissipate 
or  degrade  energy,  or  annihilate  it  as 
in  the  destruction  of  life,  on  a  scale 
that  rivals  operations  of  nature.  What 
is  still  more  curious,  his  chief  pleasures, 
so  far   as  they  are  his  own   invention, 


THE  SOLUTIONS  133 

consist  in  gratifying  the  same  unintelli- 
gent passion  for  dissipating  or  degrading 
energy,  as  in  drinking  alcohol,  or 
burning  fireworks,  or  firing  cannon,  or 
illuminating  cities,  or  deafening  them 
by  senseless  noises.  Worse  than  all, 
such  is  his  instinct  of  destruction 
that  he  systematically  exterminates  or 
degrades  all  the  larger  forms  of  animal 
life  in  which  nature  stored  her  last 
creative  efforts,  while  he  breeds  arti- 
ficially, at  great  expense  of  his  own 
energies,  and  at  cost  of  the  phosphorus 
and  lime  accumulated  by  nature's  mostly 
extinct  organisms,  the  feebler  forms  of 
animal  and  vegetable  energies  needed 
to  make  good  the  prodigious  waste  of 
his  own.  Physicists  and  physiologists 
equally  complain  of  these  tendencies  in 
man,  and  a  large  part  of  their  effort  is 
now   devoted   to   correcting   them ;    but 


134  LETTER  TO    TEACHERS 

the  physicist  adds  that,  compared  with 
this  enormous  mass  of  nature's  economies 
which  man  dissipates  every  year  in 
rapid  progression,  the  little  he  captures 
from  the  sun,  directly  or  indirectly,  as 
heat-rays,  or  water-power,  or  wind- 
power,  is  trifling,  and  the  portion  that 
he  restores  to  higher  intensities  would 
be  insignificant  in  any  case,  even  if  he 
did  not  instantly  degrade  and  dissipate 
it  again  for  some  momentary  use." 

Against  this  indictment  of  man's 
wastefulness,  not  even  Darwin,  fond 
of  paradox  as  he  was,  would  have 
cared  to  champion  man's  defence,  and 
since  Darwin  wrote,  the  waste  of 
energy  has  been  doubled  again  and 
again.  On  this  point,  the  evolutionist 
stands  at  great  disadvantage.  Astron- 
omers are  given  to  holding  the  sun  to 
a  sort  of  moral  accountability  because 


THE  SOLUTIONS  135 

it  Utilises  only  about  2,227,000,000  ^^ 
its  heat,  —  or  gravitation,  or  electricity, 
or  whatever  energies  it  dissipates,  — 
on  any  known  work,  and  degrades 
the  rest  indefinitely  in  space;  but,  if 
their  relative  resources  are  taken  into 
account,  the  sun  is,  —  according  to  the 
physicists,  —  a  model  economist  com- 
pared with  man.  The  sun  can  keep 
up  its  expenditure  indefinitely,  subject 
to  occasional  fits  of  economy ;  while 
man  is  a  bottomless  sink  of  waste 
unparalleled  in  the  cosmos,  and  can 
already  see  the  end  of  the  immense 
economies  which  his  mother  Nature 
stored  for  his  support.  Almost  all 
other  organisms,  especially  the  lowest, 
were  good  economists,  and  inorganic 
matter  seemed  to  be  perfect.  No 
physicist    dares    guess   within    millions 


136  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

of  years  tlie  date  when  the  carbonif- 
erous forests  stored  their  carbon ;  but 
it  was  an  affair  of  today  compared 
with  the  date  when  steel  stored  its 
elasticity,  or  the  magnet  its  attraction, 
or  uranium  its  radiation,  or  the  earth 
its  gravitation;  yet  the  chemists  seem 
unconscious  that  any  of  the  forms  of 
matter  actually  known  to  them,  unless 
it  be  the  radiating  activities,  have  lost 
or  are  now  degrading  their  energies, 
while  the  higher  animals  have  passed, 
and  are  still  passing,  like   dreams. 

The  evolutionist  knows  all  this  quite 
as  well  as  the  degradationist,  and  has 
never  held  man's  extravagance  for  a 
virtue  except  in  a  sense  of  his  own, 
as  though  he  were  to  adopt  the 
physicist's  figure,  and  say  that  the 
enormous  fall  of  potential  which  he 
obtained  from  all   this   combustion  was 


THE  SOLUTIONS  137 

utilised  or  converted  by  him,  and 
reappeared  in  the  intenser  form  of 
energy  called  Thought.  Considered  as 
a  mode  of  motion,  Thought  was  far 
more  valuable  than  Heat  or  Electricity, 
and  much  more  easily  stored ;  it  was 
subject  to  the  usual  mechanical  laws 
of  attraction  and  inertia ;  its  analogy 
with  Electricity  was  declared  to  be 
close ;  and  its  usefulness  was  the  more 
important  because  it  had  been  so 
carefully  economised  that  its  full  reser- 
voir could  be  drawn  upon,  —  as  in 
Universities  and  schools   and   libraries, 

—  by  all  the  world  without  limit,  like 
the  oxygen  of  the  air. 

In  literary  language.  Thought  was 
God;  —  Energy  in  abstract  and  abso- 
lute   form  ;  —  the    ultimate    Substance  ; 

—  das  Ding  an  sich.  Most  philosophy 
rested    on    this    idea   that   Thought   is 


138  LETTEK  TO  TEACHERS 

the  highest  or  subtlest  energy  of 
nature.  The  sun  is  an  immense 
energy,  but  does  its  work  on  earth 
only  by  expending  2,300,000,000  times 
more  than  equivalent  energy  in  space, 
while  Thought  does  more  work  without 
expending  any  equivalent  energy  at 
all.  By  placing  a  lens  in  the  path 
of  the  sun's  rays,  it  restores  to  any 
given  intensity  the  radiation  which 
had  been  indefinitely  diffused.  By 
cheap  mechanical  instruments  it  raises 
or  lowers  the  intensity  of  the  electric 
current.  By  slight  motions  of  the 
hand  it  sets  chemical  energies  at  work 
without  limit ;  and,  what  stamps  the 
act  as  divine,  it  impresses  the  result 
with  Form. 

Thus  the  dispute  drifts  back  again 
to  the  middle-ages.  The  physicist  can 
no   more    compromise   with   the   evolu- 


THE  SOLUTIONS  139 

tionist  than  Lord  Bacon  could  compro- 
mise with  the  Schools.  Galileo  could 
as  well  admit  that  Joshua  had  held 
up  the  sun,  as  Kelvin  could  admit  the 
power  of  man  to  reverse  the  dissipation 
of  solar  energy,  and  thus  to  produce  a 
new  energy  of  higher  potential,  called 
Thought ;  yet  even  if,  for  the  argu- 
ment's sake,  he  had  done  so,  the  dispute 
would  not  have  been  settled.  If 
Thought  were  actually  a  result  of 
transforming  other  energies  into  one  of 
a  higher  potential,  it  must  still  be  equally 
subject  to  the  laws  which  governed  those 
energies,  and  could  not  be  an  inde- 
pendent or  supernatural  force.  Turn  or 
twist  the  dilemma  as  they  pleased,  they 
returned  to  it  in  spite  of  themselves,  and 
would  do  no  better  if  the  evolutionist 
were  to  give  way,  in  his  turn,  and  offer 
the  concession  he  had  refused. 


140  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

"  On  reflection,"  lie  might  say,  "  I 
will  grant  that  thought  may  radiate  its 
energy  away,  like  electricity  and  heat ; 
a  figure  which,  I  understand  you  to 
say,  suits  your  law  of  degradation  while 
leaving  me  free  to  prove,  if  I  can,  its 
power  to  rise  in  intensity.  Where  will 
this  concession  hring  me  out  ?  You 
admit  that  the  sun  maintains  its  energy 
indefinitely  by  contracting  its  volume. 
Are  you  willing  to  admit  that  Vital 
Energy,  regarded  as  a  volume  or  society, 
might  conceivably  do  the  same  thing  ? 
and  if  so,  what  then  ?  " 

To  this,  the  physicist  must  be  sup- 
posed to  reply, — however  unwillingly, — 
that  nothing  would  suit  him  better  than 
such  a  concession, — which  he  had  in 
fact  begun  by  offering,  —  but  that,  in 
common  honesty,  he  was  bound  to 
regard   it  as   a  total   surrender  of    the 


THE  SOLUTIONS  141 

evolutionist  claims.  The  mind  either 
was  an  independent  energy,  or  it  was 
not.  If  evolutionists  conceded  at  the 
outset  that  it  was  not,  then  the  mere 
figure  mattered  nothing ;  the  dispute 
ended  of  itself,  and  the  law  of  thermo- 
dynamics went  into  operation.  If,  on 
the  contrary,  the  evolutionists  meant 
to  insist  on  independence,  they  would 
gain  little  or  nothing  by  proving  a 
power  to  prolong  life, — animal,  vege- 
table, or  physical, — by  aggregation  or 
by  concentration  ;  they  merely  changed 
the  numerical  value  of  the  variable 
called  Time : — 

"  No  doubt,"  might  a  physicist  be 
imagined  to  continue,  "you  can,  if 
you  like,  give  to  this  variable  called 
Time  a  value  approaching  infinity,  and 
this  is  your  ordinary  loop-hole  of 
escape.      You    are    welcome    to   it,   as 


142  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

far  as  concerns  us  physicists,  and  we 
will  help  you  to  get  it,  and  stay  in 
it,  if  you  will  only  leave  us  in  peace 
without  annoying  us  by  your  unscien- 
tilBc,  ignorant  objections  which  would 
put  a  stop  to  science  altogether,  if  you 
insist  on  them.  Yet  when  we  look 
at  it  from  your  point  of  view,  we  cannot 
see  what  you  gain  by  increasing  the 
element  of  Time.  You  want  to  increase 
not  Time  but  Tension.  You  do  not 
want  to  preserve  society  as  it  is, —  and 
if  you  did  want  it,  you  could  not  do  it  ; 
you  want  to  raise  the  level  of  its  Vital 
Energy.  Now,  we  admit  that  Vital 
Energy  is  not  mere  attraction  or 
cohesion  or  elasticity,  but  we  say  that 
it  is  limited  by  the  same  laws,  and  we 
know  little  about  any  of  them  except 
their  limitations.  Of  course,  the  mind 
can  reverse  them  in  action,  but  so  can 


THE  SOLUTIONS  143 

they  reverse  each  other,  and  the  mind 
too ;  as  cohesion  reverses  gravitation ; 
and  a  drop  of  water  reverses  cohesion  ; 
and  one  degree  of  heat  reverses  all. 
A  watch-spring  stores  elasticity  better'" 
than  the  mind  stores  thought.  Any 
chance  bit  of  obsidian  or  crystal  can 
set  forests  afire,  without  calling  itself 
intelligent.  A  fall  of  one  degree  in 
temperature  gives  form  to  an  icicle 
without  claiming  to  be  divine.  A 
summer  shower  develops  electricity  at 
a  tension  sufficient  to  reverse  the  energy 
of  as  many  minds  as  get  in  its  way, 
without  asserting  the  smallest  pretension 
to  reverse  natural  laws.  Nature  is  full 
of  rival  energies ;  and, — for  anything 
we  know, — may  once  have  been  full  of 
hostile  energies  ;  but,  hostile  or  friendly, 
its  infinite  variety  of  Forms,  Directions, 
Intensities  and  Complexities,  had  taken 


144  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

order  from  the  smallest  electron  and 
ion,  to  the  widest  range  of  stellar  space 
measured  by  the  most  powerful  light- 
ray,  going  through  every  possible  form 
of  physical  evolution  before  man,  —  or 
his  instinct, — or  his  reason, — or  any 
other  animal,  or  vegetable,  or  organic 
life,  or  vital  energy,  ever  stirred  !  " 

If  then  the  evolutionist,  irritated  by 
treatment  which  seems  a  far-off  echo 
of  the  remarks  of  the  King  of 
Brobdingnag  to  Gulliver  nearly  two 
hundred  years  ago,  should  still  insist 
upon  his  mind  being  the  highest 
possible  intensity  of  energy  on  account 
of  its  consciousness,  the  degradationist 
might  probably  lose  his  temper  and 
his  manners  outright,  to  the  point  of 
breaking  out :  — 

"  The  psychologists  have  already  told 
you  that  Consciousness  is  only  a  phase 


THE  SOLUTIONS  145 

in  the  decline  of  vital  energy ;  —  a 
stage  of  weakening  will.  We  physicists, 
even  less  than  you  Darwinists,  deny 
the  intensity  of  the  Will,  but  we  know 
it  to  be  stronger  in  the  Scarab  or 
the  Scorpion,  where  it  is  unconscious, 
than  in  Monkey  or  Man,  where  it  is 
conscious ;  while  we  watch,  over  and 
over  again,  with  abject  incredulity, 
the  apotheosis  of  a  butterfly  or  the 
flowering  of  an  orchid,  which  reveal 
to  our  scientific  sense  an  intensity  of 
vital  energy  out  of  all  comparison  with 
that  of  man.  We  never  tire  of  mar- 
velling at  the  essence  of  substance ;  — 
at  the  energy  of  the  atom  or  the 
glow-worm ;  but  this  is  the  motive 
behind  our  whole  thermodynamic  law. 
"The  highest  intensities  of  nature, 
such  as  produced  the  atom  and  the 
molecule  were  precisely  the  earliest 
10 


146  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

on  our  scale.  Of  the  vital  energies  in 
the  order  of  time  we  cannot  pretend 
to  know  much,  since  all  the  types 
seem  to  have  first  developed  themselves, 
during  a  great  many  millions  of  years, 
in  water,  or  under  ground,  in  conditions 
indefinitely  varied  and  altogether  un- 
known ;  but  the  moment  an  animal 
appears  above  ground,  it  turns  out  to 
be  a  Silurian  Scorpion,  a  type  of  the 
intensest  vital  energy  that  ever  lived, 
if  one  can  trust  the  entomologists. 
Next,  in  the  Carboniferous,  we  happen 
first  on  a  dragon-fly  with  '  a  spread 
of  wing  much  exceeding  two  feet.' 
(Dana,  702).  Carboniferous  insects, 
like  carboniferous  forests,  suggest  in- 
tensities indefinitely  stronger  in  creative 
power  than  any  energies  known  to  be 
at  work  today.  In  fact,  no  creative 
energies  whatever  are  known  to  be  at 


THE  SOLUTIONS  147 

work  today,  unless  it  be  the  radiating 
activities.  Mere  heat  creates  nothing. 
Neither  heat  nor  its  absence  accounts 
for  any  of  the  problems  of  vital 
energy,  —  neither  for  the  cell,  nor  the 
form,  nor  the  movement,  nor  the 
consciousness,  nor  the  descent,  nor  the 
inheritance,  nor  the  intelligence,  of 
organisms ;  nor  does  motion  account 
for  direction.  No  intelligent  man 
now-a-days  is  satisfied  with  a  purely 
mechanical  formula. 

"  Palaeontologists  talk  only  of  speciali- 
sation, as  though  the  more  elaborate 
type  were  the  higher  intensity.  The 
opposite  is  more  likely  to  be  true. 
Geology  suggests  plainly  that,  after  at 
least  fifty  million  years  of  conditions 
which  made  life  impossible  except 
under  water,  these  anarchic  forces  dissi- 
pated themselves  so  far  as  to  settle  into 


148  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

an  equilibrium  which  showed  itself  on 
land  in  the  wild  exuberance  of  the 
carboniferous  forests,  and  which  then 
developed  into  the  wilder  exuberance  of 
the  Eocene  mammals.  How  long  this 
exuberance  lasted,  Saporta  has  told  us ; 
and  he  is  also  authority  for  the  fact, — 
not  the  theory,  I  say,  —  that  the  equi- 
librium was  overthrown  by  the  steady 
dissipation  of  energy.  Gaudry,  another 
sufficient  authority,  has  added  that  vital 
energy  fell  step  by  step,  and  phase  by 
phase,  with  solar  energy.  The  geolo- 
gists in  general  seem  to  agree  with  the 
astronomers  in  teaching  that  both  forms 
of  energy  will  continue  to  fall  in 
intensity  until  both  disappear.  Mean- 
while we  are  perfectly  at  liberty  to 
teach  that  the  relative  intensity  of  each 
phase  measured  the  relative  intensity  of 
each  creation  of  land-organisms  in  the 


THE  SOLUTIONS  149 

order  of  time.  We  are  not  only  at 
liberty  to  do  it ;  we  are  logically  com- 
pelled to  insist  upon  it.  No  other 
order  of  sequence  can  be  made  to  accord 
with  the  positively  miraculous  properties 
which  defy  explanation  in  organic  as 
in  inorganic  nature. 

"  We  all  remember  the  desperate 
efforts  that  Darwin  made  to  fit  within 
a  uniformitarian  schedule  these  violent 
leaps  in  the  energy  of  evolution,  but 
we  seldom  realise  how  difficult  he  found 
the  task  of  convincing  himself  that  his 
own  scheme  was  convenient.  When  he 
said,  as  he  often  did,  that  he  never 
thought  of  the  eye  without  a  chill, — 
'  the  eye,  to  this  day  (1860),  gives  me 
a  cold  shudder,'  —  he  meant,  —  among 
other  things, — that  his  theory  was  good 
for  notliing  as  a  convenient  means  of 
explaining   why    the   eye    should   have 


150  LETTEE  TO  TEACHERS 

leaped  to  perfection  from  its  start,  when 
it  should  have  been  the  slowest  in  the 
order  of  evolution.  In  fact,  the  eye  of 
the  jSrst  fish,  at  the  beginning  of  geo- 
logical time,  was  at  least  as  good  as 
that  of  his  descendant  still  living 
unchanged ;  and  the  first  trilobites, 
somewhere  in  Silurian  ages,  had  eyes 
of  twelve  or  fifteen  thousand  facets. 
*  Assuredly,'  says  Gaudry,  '  we  marvel 
at  such  complication  in  creatures  of  such 
great  antiquity,  but  we  cannot  conclude 
that  the  organ  of  sight  reached  its  whole 
perfection  in  the  primary  period,  for 
probably  the  thirty  thousand  facets  of 
Remopleurides  were  not  equal  in  value 
to  the  two  beautiful  eyes  of  our  actual 
mammals.'  Such  a  probably  might 
well  cause  Darwin  a  chill ;  but  had  he 
gone  on  to  say  that  the  decline  of  the 
tertiary  quadrupeds  caused  him  a  worse 


THE  SOLUTIONS  151 

shudder,  he  would  have  said  only  what 
Dana  seemed  to  feel,  and  what  strikes 
every  physicist  with  astonishment  when 
he  reads  it  in  Dana,  about  the  universal 
stunting  of  animal  life  in  recent  times. 
In  South  America  alone,  during  and 
since  the  glacial  epoch,  the  extinct 
species  of  quadrupeds  number  more 
than  a  hundred,  while,  among  the 
peculiarly  South  American  order  of 
Ant-eaters,  the  extinct  species  were 
more  numerous  than  all  those  that 
'  now  exist  in  that  part  of  the  conti- 
nent, and  were  far  larger  animals/ 
In  Australia  the  Marsupials  prove  the 
same  law :  '  As  on  the  other  conti- 
nents, the  moderns  are  dwarfs  by  the 
side  of  the  ancient  species.'  As  a 
universal  rule,  the  fact  of  dwindling 
size  holds  true  of  a  large  part  of 
the  mammals,  including  elephants   and 


152  LETTER  TO  TEACHEES 

herbivores  as  well  as  many  carnivores, 
edentates,  rodents  and  marsupials : 
'  The  kinds  that  continued  into  modern 
time  became  dwindled  in  the  change 
wherever  found  over  the  globe,  not- 
withstanding the  fact  that  genial 
climates  are  still  to  be  found  over 
large  regions.'  (Dana,  997).  Neither 
Kelvin  nor  Faye,  neither  Lapparent 
nor  Flammarion,  asserted  the  brutal 
facts  of  degradation  nearly  so  strongly 
as  Dana. 

"To  this  law,  which  has  already 
reduced  us  to  '  living  in  an  impoverished 
world,'  you  evolutionists  require  us 
physicists,  under  some  mysterious  pen- 
alty, to  make  for  you  an  exception 
in  favor  of  man.  We  cannot  do  it. 
We  are  willing  to  yield  much  of  the 
old  mechanical  ground.  We  grant  that 
we    cannot    explain   why,    in    man    or 


THE  SOLUTIONS  153 

in  molecule,  the  primitive  energies  of 
nature  took  directions  which  imply,  — 
in  our  limited  experience,  —  a  reasoning 
forethought.  Cause  is  a  transcendental 
problem  beyond  our  grasp.  We  no 
longer  venture  even  to  assert  that  we 
know  the  creative  forces  at  all.  We  say 
only  that  in  the  world  which  we  do 
know,  we  can  see  nothing  supernatural 
in  action.  Infinite  complication  we 
admit,  but  no  ultimate  contradiction. 
Sooner  or  later,  every  apparent  excep- 
tion, whether  man  or  radium,  tends 
to  fall  within  the  domain  of  physics. 
Against  this  necessity,  human  beings 
have  always  rebelled.  For  thousands 
of  years  they  have  stood  apart,  superior 
to  physical  laws.  The  time  has  come 
when  they  must  yield. 

"  The    claim   that    Reason    must    be 
classed    as    an    energy    of  the   highest 


154  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

intensity  is  itself  unreasonable.  On 
the  contrary,  Reason  is  the  last  in 
time,  and  therefore  the  lowest  in 
tension.  According  to  our  western 
standards,  the  most  intense  phase  of 
human  Energy  occurred  in  the  form  of 
religious  and  artistic  emotion, — perhaps 
in  the  Crusades  and  Gothic  Churches  ; 
—  but  since  then,  though  vastly 
increased  in  apparent  mass,  human 
energy  has  lost  intensity  and  continues 
to  lose  it  with  accelerated  rapidity 
as  the  Church  proves.  Organised  in 
society,  as  a  volume,  it  becomes  a 
multiplied  number  of  enfeebled  units, 
on  which,  like  the  eye  in  insects, 
reason  acts  as  an  enormously  multiplied 
lens,  converging  nature's  lines  of  will, 
and  taking  direction  from  them,  but 
adding  nothing  of  its  own.  Man  has, 
indeed,  —  or    had,  —  in    a    few   of   his 


THE  SOLUTIONS  155 

stems,  some  faculty  for  artistic  expres- 
sion, not  nearly  so  strong  as  that  of 
some  plants,  or  some  butterflies,  or 
some  birds,  but  more  varied.  This 
instinct  he  probably  inherited  from  an 
earlier,  more  gifted,  animal ;  but  as  a 
creative  energy  he  inherited  next  to 
nothing.  The  coral  polyp  is  a  giant 
beside  him.  As  an  energy  he  has  but 
one  dominant  function  :  —  that  of  ac- 
celerating the  operation  of  the  second 
law  of  thermodynamics.  So  far  as  his 
reason  acts  as  an  energy  at  all,  it  is 
a  miraculous  invention  for  this  purpose, 
which  inspires  wonder  and  almost 
worship ;  but  in  strjctness  the  reason 
does  no  work,  —  it  is  only  a  mechan- 
ism ;  —  nature's  energy,  which  we 
have  agreed  to  call  Will,  that  lies 
behind  reason,  does  the  work,  —  and 
degrades  the  energy  in  doing  it ! " 


156  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

Evidently,  on  these  lines,  no  sort  of 
agreement  is  possible.  The  two  figures 
contradict  each  other  beyond  the  chance 
of  conciliation.  Of  course  the  contra- 
diction has  been  slightly  exaggerated 
to  make  it  clear ;  but  if  the  physicist 
had  not  himself  lost  the  high  literary 
potential  of  Swift  and  Voltaire,  he 
would  exaggerate  to  much  better  pur- 
pose, and  would  handle  the  unfortu- 
nate creature  called  Man  in  a  temper 
such  as  anyone  may  renew  who  cares 
to  go  back  to  Bunyan  or  Dante  or 
the  Bible,  not  to  mention  the  Prophets 
in  particular ;  but  he  would  convince 
no  one.  Man  refuses  to  be  degraded 
in  self-esteem,  of  which  he  has  never 
had  enough  to  save  him  from  bitter 
self-reproaches.  He  yearns  for  flattery, 
and  he  needs  it.  The  contradiction 
between  science  and  instinct  is  so  radi- 


THE   SOLUTIONS  157 

cal  that,  though  science  should  prove 
twenty  times  over,  by  every  method 
of  demonstration  known  to  it,  that 
man  is  a  thermodynamic  mechanism, 
instinct  would  reject  the  proof,  and 
whenever  it  should  be  convinced,  it 
would  have  to  die. 

If  the  dead-lock  were  a  new  thing, 
the  situation  would  not  be  so  difficult, 
but  the  history  of  the  last  five  hundred 
years  tells  of  little  else.  Man  began 
by  usurping  the  rank  of  lord  of  creation. 
Galileo  and  Newton  succeeded  in  depos- 
ing him,  much  against  his  will, — as  the 
Church  very  candidly  confessed, — but 
he  has  never  despaired  of  reinstating 
himself  by  means  of  his  Reason.  The 
doctrine  of  evolution  seemed,  in  the 
nineteenth  century,  to  favor  him.  For 
fifty  years,  society  flattered  itself  that 
science   stood   solidly  behind   it,  lifting 


158  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

it  up  from  lower  powers  to  higher,  and 
restoring  it  to  its  old  rank  and  self- 
respect  as  child  and  heir  to  the  infinite. 
The  contrary  assertion  of  Kelvin  had 
no  effect  upon  it  whatever.  Indeed  if 
Eduard  von  Hartmann  is  right,  society 
deliberately  chose  to  be  silent  about  the 
direction  of  physics,  and  refused  to 
think  or  talk  about  it ;  but  silence  has 
never  stopped  this  dispute,  at  least  in 
western  civilisation,  since  the  martyrdom 
of  Prometheus,  and  merely  hurried  the 
moment  when,  on  scientific  principles, 
another  catastrophe,  like  that  of  the 
Newtonian  philosophy,  became  immi- 
nent. 

William  Thomson  and  Clausius, 
Helmholz  and  Balfour  Stewart,  asserted 
and  reiterated  the  certainty  of  this 
catastrophe,  in  vain,  as  Descartes  had 
asserted  it, — also  in  vain, — two  hundred 


THE  SOLUTIONS  159 

years  before;  but  Descartes  offered  a 
compromise,  and  in  that  respect  differed 
from  Kelvin.  Descartes  proposed  to 
free  man  from  material  bondage,  pro- 
vided he  might  mechanize  all  other  vital 
energies.  Society  rose  in  arms  to 
protect  the  dog,  and  so  defeated  the 
scheme,  leaving  the  world  to  go  on 
asserting  two  contradictory  principles 
in  the  same  breath,  down  to  the  present 
day,  to  the  undiminished  embarrassment 
of  Universities,  and  with  little  per- 
ceptible change  in  the  situation,  except 
that  the  Universities  of  today  hesitate 
to  assert  with  confidence  the  old  con- 
viction of  spiritual  authority,  showing 
in  this  respect  a  distinct  decline  in 
energy ;  while  technical  instruction  has 
reached,  —  or  seems  on  the  verge  of 
reaching,  —  the  point  where  it  must 
insist  on  the  universal  application  of 
its  thermodynamic  law. 


160  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

Since  compromise  of  principle  seems 
to  be  out  of  the  question,  there  remains 
only  the  resource  of  direct  conflict. 
Each  party  is  thrown  back  on  the 
horns  of  a  dilemma,  —  the  same  old 
dilemma  of  Saint  Augustine  and 
Descartes,  —  the  dead-lock  of  free-will. 
The  professor  of  physics  will  ask  his 
colleague,  the  professor  of  history,  to 
explain  the  process  by  which  energy 
raises  its  own  potential  without  cost, 
since  this  has  been  an  object  greatly 
desired  by  school-masters  from  the 
earliest  known  ages,  and  would  singu- 
larly simplify  the  professorial  accounts. 
The  teacher  of  history,  who  has 
trouble  enough  already  in  trying  to 
raise  the  potential  of  his  scholars' 
energy,  can  only  retort  by  asking  his 
colleague  to  show  how  his  own  teach- 
ing    proves     progressive     enfeeblement 


THE  SOLUTIONS  161 

and  degradation  of  quality.  The  deg- 
radationist  might  be  quite  ready  to 
admit  it,  and  quite  competent  to  prove 
it,  but  he  knows  that  he  has  already 
turned  his  own  thermodynamic  law 
into  a  means  of  convincing  society  of 
the  contrary.  Since  the  year  1830, 
when  the  great  development  of  physi- 
cal energies  began,  all  school-teaching 
has  learned  to  take  for  granted  that 
man's  progress  in  mental  energy  is 
measured  by  his  capture  of  physical 
forces,  amounting  to  some  fifty  million 
steam  horse-power  from  coal,  and  at 
least  as  much  more  from  chemical  and 
elementary  sources ;  besides  indefinite 
potentials  in  his  stored  experience,  and 
progressive  rise  in  the  intensities  of 
the  forces  he  keeps  in  constant  use- 
He  cares  little  what  becomes  of  all 
this  new  power;  he  is  satisfied  to 
11 


162  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

know  that  he  habitually  develops 
heat  at  3000°  Centigrade  and  electricity 
by  the  hundred  thousand  volts,  from 
sources  of  indefinitely  degraded  energy  ; 
and  that  his  mind  has  learned  to 
control  them.  Man's  Reason  once 
credited  with  this  addition  of  volume 
and  intensity,  its  victory  seems 
assured.  The  teacher  of  history  need 
then  trouble  himself  with  no  further 
doubts  of  Evolution  ;  but  the  teacher 
of  physics  seems  —  at  least  to  an 
ignorant  world  whose  destiny  hangs  on 
the  balance,  —  very  much  required  to 
defend  himself. 

Although  this  form  of  physical  psy- 
chology is  less  than  a  hundred  years 
old  it  has  already  taken  possession  of 
society  so  completely  as  to  serve  it, 
in  place  of  the  old  religious  and 
mechanical  formulas,  for  a  philosophical 


THE  SOLUTIONS  163 

foundation.  The  historian  has  a  right 
to  use  it  as  such ;  but  according  to 
the  understanding  of  the  physical  law 
already  discussed,  one  would  think 
physicists  debarred  from  admitting  it. 
To  them  it  should  seem  an  illusion, 
although  one  difficult  to  deal  with  ; 
but,  as  far  as  a  bystander  has  means 
of  judging,  they  would  still  be  at  liberty 
to  turn  the  dilemma  about,  and  seek 
to  impale  their  antagonist  on  the 
reversed  horn,  by  suggesting  that  the 
theory  of  tropism  or  induction,  or  of 
physico-chemical  relations  .in  general, 
seems  to  require  that  the  psychical  will, 
under  such  conditions,  should  not  absorb 
physical  energy  so  much  as  physical 
energy  would  absorb  the  psychical  will. 
Two  similar  energies,  when  in  contact, 
would  tend  to  a  common  level ;  force, 
if     powerful     enough,     would     control 


164  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

thought ;  the  ocean  would  dissolve  the 
crystal  of  salt ;  so  that,  if  the  evo- 
lutionist should  insist  on  identifying 
the  quality  of  his  psychical  energy 
with  the  quantity  of  his  steam-  or  water- 
power  or  electric  voltage,  the  physicist 
would  expect  to  see  the  psychical 
potential  of  society  vanish  as  suddenly 
as  the  potential  of  a  Ley  den  jar. 

Perhaps  the  Universities  might  be 
quicker  than  the  technical  schools  to 
see  the  point  of  this  retort,  since 
they  claim,  in  theory,  to  deal  with 
quality  rather  than  with  quantity,  and 
possibly  some  professors  have  noticed 
that  quality  may  sometimes  suffer  from 
contact  with  volume.  The  idea  is  not 
precisely  new,  —  far  from  it !  —  even 
beyond  the  pale  of  European  Univer- 
sities, portions  of  society  have  shown  a 
somewhat    enfeebled    instinct   of   revolt 


THE  SOLUTIONS  166 

against  the  psychical  processes  of  the 
press  and  the  public.  Various  writers 
have  discussed  the  effect  of  dissolving 
society  into  a  single  mixture ;  even 
a  name,  —  panmixia  —  has  been  made 
for  it.  Nothing  is  commoner  than  the 
prejudice  against  mechanical  energy  as 
a  weakener  of  nervous  energy  when- 
ever it  gets  control,  as  in  manufactur- 
ing towns ;  or  the  belief  that  great 
masses  of  people  under  uniform  con- 
ditions tend  to  a  mechanical  uniformity 
of  mind,  as  in  agricultural  districts ; 
but  the  interest  of  the  subject  lies 
less  in  the  application  of  the  theory 
than  in  the  shape  which  the  theory 
would  have  to  take  in  order  to 
conform  with  the  rest  of  the  law 
of  thermodynamics.  Physicists  know 
best  what  their  mathematical  formulas 
for  electricity  and    gases    and    solutions 


166  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

are ;  historians  have  no  right  to  meddle 
with  the  methods  of  colleagues  in 
rival  departments ;  but  they  cannot 
help  feeling  curiosity  to  know  whether 
Ostwald's  line  of  reasoning  would 
logically  end  in  subjecting  both  psychi- 
cal and  physico-chemical  energies  to 
the  natural  and  obvious  analogy  of 
heat,  and  extending  the  law  of  Entropy 
over  all.  (Ostwald,  "  Vorlesungen," 
Leipzig,   1902,  p.  398). 

Few  physicists  would  be  likely  to 
see  any  scientific  sense  in  this  personal 
application  of  their  law,  and  no  one 
is  readier  than  the  historian  to  admit 
that  vital  Energy  is  probably  not  so 
simple  as  any  formula  that  he  could 
state,  or  understand  if  stated  to  him. 
The  most  ardent  lover  of  paradox, — 
the  most  inveterate  humorist,  —  would 
hardly   think    it    worth    his    while    to 


THE  SOLUTIONS  167 

follow  a  train  of  reasoning  wliicli  would 
surely  immolate  physics  and  metaphysics 
together.  Such  amusements  seem  to  be 
reserved  for  astronomers ;  but  neither 
historians  nor  sociologists  can  afford  to 
let  themselves  be  driven  into  admitting 
that  every  gain  of  power, — from  gun- 
powder to  steam, — from  the  dynamo  to 
the  Daimler  motor, — has  been  made  at 
the  cost  of  man's — and  of  woman's — 
vitality.  The  mischiefs  thus  charged 
upon  Keason  would  not  end  there. 
Metaphysics  as  well  as  mathematics 
would  measure  enfeeblement ;  phi- 
losophy as  well  as  mechanics  would 
mark  degradation  ;  the  Universities  as 
well  as  the  technical  schools  would  alike 
close  their  doors  without  waiting  for 
the  sun  to  grow  cold. 

Direct    conflict,    therefore,    seems    to 
be  as  barren    as   compromise.     Hereto- 


168  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

fore  in  human  experience,  such  reason- 
ing would  have  been  dismissed  at  once 
as  only  the  usual  futile  attempt  at 
reduction  to  the  absurd.  That  it  would 
pass  for  such  in  a  University  of  today 
is  an  open  question  ;  it  sounds  rather 
like  another  way  of  saying  what  Arndt, 
Branco  and  Hopf,  as  well  as  Eousseau 
and  a  thousand  others,  have  said  for 
the  past  hundred  and  fifty  years ;  but 
in  any  case  it  has  no  value  for  teachers, 
since  it  leads  only  to  the  stoppage  of 
teaching  altogether.  If  the  teacher  of 
history  cares  to  contest  the  ground  with 
the  teacher  of  physics,  he  must  become 
a  physicist  himself,  and  learn  to  use 
laboratory  methods.  He  needs  technical 
tools  quite  as  much  as  the  electrician 
does ;  large  formulas,  like  Willard 
Gibbs's  E-ule  of  Phases  ;  generalisations, 
no    matter    how    temporary    or    hypo- 


THE  SOLUTIONS  169 

thetical,  sucli  as  all  mathematicians  use 
for  the  convenience  of  their  scholars. 
The  whole  field  of  physics  is  covered 
with  such  temporary  structures,  mere 
approximations  to  truth,  but  in  con- 
stant demand  as  tools.  Mathematicians 
practice  absolute  freedom ;  they  have 
the  right — and  use  it, — to  assume  that 
a  straight  line  is,  or  is  not,  the  shortest 
distance  between  two  points,  as  they 
please.  In  the  whole  domain  of  science, 
no  field  of  cultivation  is  poorer  in  such 
labor-saving  devices  than  that  of  human 
history,  yet  Man,  as  a  form  of  energy,  is 
in  most  need  of  getting  a  firm  footing 
on  the  law  of  thermodynamics.  One 
cannot  doubt  that  Lord  Kelvin  could 
have  suggested  half-a-dozen  figures 
which  would  answer  the  purpose, 
although  he  might  very  well  have 
refused  to  waste  his  own  stock  of  vital 


170  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

energy  in  tlie  effort  to  prove  his  thermo- 
dynamic ascent  from  a  hypothetical 
eocene  lemur,  or  even  from  a  duck- 
billed platypus  ;  neither  of  which  would 
have  promised  energetic  means  of  saving 
him  from  the  pitfalls  which  his  keen 
mathematical  instinct  would  have  shown 
him  as  the  work  of  his  fellow-physicists, 
planted  directly  in  his  path. 

Whatever  the  difficulties,  Kelvin 
would  have  faced  them  honestly.  He 
had  courage  beyond  the  common,  and 
if  the  problem  had  been  forced  on 
him  as  he  forced  it  on  others,  he 
would  not  even  have  felt  himself 
obliged  to  obey  his  own  laws.  Almost 
in  his  last  words  he  pathetically  pro- 
claimed that  his  life  was  a  failure 
in  its  long  effort  to  reduce  his  physical 
energies  to  a  single  term.  Dying  he 
left  the    unity,    duality  or   multiplicity 


THE  SOLUTIONS  171 

of  energies  as  much  disputed  as  ever. 
"  A  certain  anarchy  reigns  in  the 
sciences  of  nature's  domain,"  says  M. 
Lucien  Poincare,  who  is  regarded  as  a 
sufficient  authority  ;  "  any  venture  may 
be  risked ;  no  law  appears  rigorously 
necessary."  Within  the  past  year 
Professor  Joly  of  Dublin  has  seriously 
risked  such  a  venture  in  his  "  Radio- 
activity and  Geology ;  an  account  of 
the  Influence  of  Padio-active  Energy 
on  Terrestrial  History,"  (London, 
1909) ;  and  although  the  general 
reader  gathers  from  it  mainly  the 
conclusion  that  physical  science  is  more 
or  less  chaotic,  this  conclusion  is  only 
what  he  needs  to  reach  before  he 
can  begin  to  deal  with  vital  science 
which  is  all  chaos.  "We  see  the 
middle-  and  the  end-series  of  the 
phylogenetic     series,"      says     Peinke ; 


172  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

"that  we  do  not  see  the  beginning 
is  self-evident,  since  it  was  built  up 
in  a  period  of  the  earth's  history 
which  is  for  us  transcendental ; " 
("  Einleitung,"  p.  612) ;  we  could  not 
understand  it  if  we  did  see  it.  So 
far  as  concerns  the  history  of  man, 
every  period  of  the  earth's  history, 
beyond  its  actual  condition,  is  trans- 
cendental. The  anthropologist  knows 
nothing  whatever  about  it.  Among  a 
thousand  possible  varieties  of  primitive 
man,  he  has  scarcely  more  than  two 
or  three  doubtful  clues  to  follow,  and 
thus  far  these  lead  nowhere.  Appar- 
ently this  is  the  only  certain  result 
of  sixty  years'  effort  in  physics  and 
physiology.  Forced  back  on  the  logi- 
cal suicide  of  asserting  or  accepting 
an  act  of  creation,  biologists  prefer 
to  admit  mental  enfeeblement,  even  at 


THE  SOLUTIONS  173 

the  risk  of  being  driven  to  admit 
both ;  so  that,  if  the  safety  of  society 
should  seem  now  to  depend  on  assum- 
ing a  multiple  cause,  as  of  old  on 
establishing  the  unity  of  creation, 
nothing  obliges  society  to  persist  in 
its  monist  scheme.  If  the  physicist 
cannot  make  mind  the  master,  as  the 
metaphysician  would  like,  he  can  at 
least  abstain  from  making  it  the  slave. 
So  little  essential  is  monism,  that 
M.  H.  Poincare  lately  startled  the 
world  by  avowing  that  physicists  used 
that  formula  only  because  all  science 
would  become  impossible  if  they  were 
not  allowed  to  assume  simple  hypothe- 
ses ( "  La  Science  et  I'Hypothese," 
p.  173) ;  but  this  mental  need  of 
unity  is  also  a  weakness,  which  gives 
the  degradationist  an  artificial  and 
altogether  unfair  advantage.     The  con- 


174  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

venience  of  unity  is  beyond  question, 
and  convenience  overrides  morals  as 
well  as  money,  when  a  vast  majority 
of  minds,  educated  or  not,  are  invited 
to  live  in  a  complex  of  anarchical 
energies,  with  only  the  privilege  of 
acting  as  chief  anarchists.  Bewildered 
and  outraged  they  reject  the  image ; 
but  they  find  that  of  diffusion  or 
degradation  so  simple  and  so  natural 
as  to  satisfy  every  want.  The  Dar- 
winian readily  admits  that  Kelvin's 
sun  accounts  for  evolution  better  than 
Darwin's  did ;  and  he  is  only  too 
ready  to  drop  all  the  school-phrases,  — 
to  call  the  process  Transformation,  and 
so,  quietly,  surrender  the  issue.  He 
is  equally  ready  to  admit  that  Darwin 
never  supplied  a  motive  power  that 
should  vary  in  force  with  the  phenom- 
ena;   he   might   even   go   so    far   as  to 


THE  SOLUTIONS  175 

concede  that  the  want  of  such  an 
energy  had  embarrassed  biology  nearly 
to  the  point  of  paralysis ;  while  he 
must  honestly  grant  that  Kelvin  began 
mathematically  by  giving  himself,  from 
the  start,  all  the  power  he  needed, 
in  the  degree  in  which  he  needed  it, 
so  that  his  system  supplied  its  own 
force,  —  like  the  Niagara  river,  —  by 
degrading  its  own  energies.  Simplicity 
may  not  be  evidence  of  truth,  and 
unity  is  perhaps  the  most  deceptive 
of  all  the  innumerable  illusions  of 
mind ;  but  both  are  primary  instincts 
in  man,  and  have  an  attraction  on 
the  mind  akin  to  that  of  gravitation 
on  matter.  The  idea  of  unity  sur- 
vives the  idea  of  God  or  of  Universe ; 
it  is  innate  and  intuitive.  Thought 
floats  much  more  easily  towards  than 
against  it,  and  from  the  moment  when 


176  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

heat,  or  electricity,  or  thought,  or  any- 
other  form  or  symbol  or  medium  of 
energy,  was  likened  to  a  falling  sub- 
stance tending  to  an  ultimate  ocean  of 
Entropy,  nothing  was  simpler  than  to 
plot  out  the  ordinates  and  abscissas 
that  marked  its  curve  of  evolution. 
Astronomy,  geology,  palaeontology,  biol- 
ogy, psychology,  could  all  move  majes- 
tically down  the  decline. 

Perhaps  the  feature  of  the  scheme 
that  was  most  repulsive  to  instinct,  was 
most  seductive  to  science,  —  its  fatal 
facility  in  accounting  for  Reason.  All 
organisms  would  tend  to  develop 
nervous  systems  when  dynamically  ill- 
nourished.  As  the  Drosera  is  repre- 
sented to  have  taken  to  a  diet  of 
insects  when  it  could  no  longer 
nourish  itself  sufficiently  as  a  vegetable, 
or  as  a  tree  may  throw  out  wider  and 


THE  SOLUTIONS  177 

deeper  roots  in  the  degree  that  com- 
plexity might  bring  moisture,  so  the 
vital  energy  which  had  developed  in 
the  exuberance  of  physical  quantity  so 
long  as  its  dynamic  supplies  were  in 
excess  of  its  needs,  would  turn  itself, 
as  its  conditions  were  impoverished, 
into  those  "  connecting,  or,  as  they 
are  technical^  called,  association-fibres, 
which  make  nerve-currents  work 
together  as  they  could  not  without 
being  thus  associated."  Thought  then 
appears  in  nature  as  an  arrested, — in 
other  words,  as  a  degraded, — physical 
action.  The  theory  is  convenient,  and 
convenience  makes  law,  at  least  in  the 
laboratory. 

In    this    freedom    of    handling    his 

energies   the    physicist    enjoys    another 

easy    advantage    over    the    sociologist. 

As   already    pointed   out,   the   physicist 

12 


178  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

is  safe  from  interference  so  long  as  lie 
can  still  promise  expansion  of  power, 
or  relief  from  pain  ;  while  the  oldest 
and  driest  professor  of  history  would 
smile  at  the  idea  of  trying  to  imitate 
his  vivacious  colleague  by  telling  his 
students,  at  the  opening  of  the  collegiate 
year,  that,  "as  an  approximately  correct 
working  hypothesis,"  he  should  proceed 
to  treat  the  history  of  modern  Europe 
and  America  as  a  typical  example  of 
energies  indicating  degradation  "  with 
headlong  rapidity  "  towards  "  inevitable 
death."  Probably  he  would  have  no 
more  difficulty  than  the  physicist  has, 
in  making  his  material  fit  his  figure  ; 
history  can  be  written  in  one  sense  just 
as  easily  as  in  another ;  but  however 
perfect  this  figure  might  seem  to  him 
he  would  not  think  it  suited  to  the 
interests  of  the  students  or  of  the  Uni- 


THE  SOLUTIONS  179 

versity,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the 
University  has  never  committed  itself 
to  the  contrary.  Indeed  he  could  truth- 
fully say  that  the  Universities  in  Europe 
have  never  preached  upward  evolution 
at   all. 

History  began  with  admitting  as 
its  starting-point  that  the  speechless 
animal  who  raised  himself  to  the  use  of 
an  inflected  language  must  have  made 
an  effort  greater  and  longer  than  the 
effort  required  for  him,  after  perfecting 
his  tongue,  to  vulgarise  and  degrade  it. 
Even  after  descending  to  the  familiar 
facts  of  relatively  recent  evolution, 
historians  never  teach  that  Egyptian 
pyramids  and  tombs  show  childlike 
inferiority  to  the  tombs  and  temples  of 
Berlin.  Artists  have  never  been  known 
to  illustrate  their  lectures  on  the  history 
of  their  art  by  showing  how  much  the 


180  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

sculpture  of  Pheidias  and  Praxiteles 
might  have  been  improved  by  an 
acquaintance  with  the  sculpture  of  Lon- 
don. Dramatists  do  not  hold  up  to 
derision  the  feebleness  of  Aeschylus  or 
the  folly  of  Aristophanes  before  the 
gigantic  force  and  genius  of  Sardou 
and  E-ostand  on  the  Paris  stage. 
American  professors  do  not  read  Pindar 
or  Lucretius  aloud  in  order  to  suit  the 
intelligence  of  their  children  in  the 
nurseries  of  New  York  and  Chicago. 
Historians  seldom  express  contempt 
for  Thucydides,  and  still  devote  vol- 
umes to  Alexander  the  Great  and 
Julius  Csesar.  They  have  obstinately 
shirked  the  duty  of  applying  the  law 
of  elevation  to  their  view  of  history, 
but  rather  have  bitterly  opposed  it. 
Even  the  prophet  of  progress  in  the 
English     school,  —  Macaulay,  —  could 


THE  SOLUTIONS  181 

not  resist  the  old  trick  of  reviving  a 
conventional  barbarian  to  gloat,  "  in  the 
midst  of  a  vast  solitude,"  —  over  the  ex- 
hausted energies  of  England.  Histories 
invariably  use  Kelvin's  figure  Avhenever 
it  is  convenient,  and  talk  of  new- 
races  in  set  terms  as  so  much  fresh 
fuel,  or  oxygen,  flung  on  the  burnt-out 
energies  of  empire ;  while  the  greatest 
historical  work  in  the  English  language 
is  called   "The  Decline  and  Fall." 

Something  less  than  two  hundred 
and  fifty  years  ago,  all  the  greatest 
scholars  and  wits  of  Europe  were 
disputing  the  relative  superiority  of 
ancients  and  moderns.  Swift's  Battle 
of  the  Books  still  lives  as  a  sparkling 
record  of  it.  The  moderns,  having 
the  advantage  of  being  alive,  decided 
the  result  in  their  own  favor,  but, 
until  the  amazing  influx  of  mechanical 


182  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

and  physical  energies  after  1830,  the 
European  Universities  never  seemed 
clear  on  the  subject,  and  would  be 
quite  likely  today  to  reverse  the 
judgment  on  such  evidence  as  decided 
the  case  in  1700.  Only  an  unusually 
well-informed  scholar  could  say  with 
certainty  what  the  German  or  French 
Universities  think  about  the  dogma  of 
upward  evolution  in  the  year  1910, 
but  their  record  is  a  bad  one. 

On  the  dogma  of  Degradation  their 
record  is  worse.  If  the  human  race 
is  to  depend  on  their  suifrages,  its 
state  is  a  parlous  one.  For  a  thousand 
years,  as  long  as  religion  held  sway, 
teachers  were  not  merely  permitted,  — 
they  were  obliged,  to  condemn  the 
human  race,  —  with  rare  exceptions, 
due  only  to  the  pity  of  God,  —  to 
eternal   degradation    following  the  near 


THE  SOLUTIONS  183 

end  of  the  world.  After  1500  tlie 
Church  very  slowly  lost  its  control 
of  education,  but  the  attitude  of  the 
schools  changed  little  in  regard  to 
human  history.  In  the  University  as 
in  the  pulpit,  the  standard  of  excellence 
remained  among  the  Greeks,  or  the 
Romans,  or  the  Jews,  when  it  was  not 
carried  back  to  the  Garden  of  Eden. 
In  the  nineteenth  century,  everyone 
knows  how  eagerly  the  public  responded 
to  Wagner's  resuscitation  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  By  most  artists  modern  life 
is  assumed  as  decadence.  What  is 
most  striking  of  all,  the  Universities 
have  begun  again,  —  within  fifty  years, 
—  to  announce  through  their  astrono- 
mers the  approaching  demise  of  the 
solar  system ;  through  their  geologists, 
the  death  of  the  earth  and  its  occu- 
pants ;     through    their    physicists,    the 


184  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

years  still  left  for  suns  to  shine,  and 
the  ultimate  destiny  of  the  celestial 
universe  to  become  atomic  dust  at 
— 270°  Centigrade ;  while  their  anthro- 
pologists point  out  the  rapid  exhaustion 
of  the  race,  and  their  newspapers  day 
by  day  proclaim  its  steady  degradation. 
What  makes  the  matter  infinitely  worse 
is  the  common,  daily  experience  that, 
not  only  in  Universities  but  also  at 
every  street-corner  of  every  European 
city,  on  every  half-holiday,  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  men  are  taught  to 
believe  with  delight,  that  society,  down 
to  the  present  day,  is  an  unnatural 
abortion,  sustained  by  perverted  illu- 
sions, and  destined  to  immediate  suicide. 
To  such  a  point  has  this  habit  of 
teaching  gone,  that  society  itself,  at 
every  national  and  municipal  election, 
is     seen     physically     trembling ;      per- 


THE  SOLUTIONS  185 

plexed  and  confused ;  feeling  its  way ; 
conscious  of  its  dangers ;  anxious  to  do 
right ;  ashamed  of  the  sores  which,  — 
as  it  is  solemnly  assured,  —  disfigure 
its  surface,  and  of  the  hideous  tumors 
which,  —  as  it  is  incessantly  told, — 
are  ravaging  its  vitals ;  half-willing  to 
be  sacrificed,  like  Iphigenia,  but  timidly 
shrinking  from  staking  the  life,  de- 
scribed as  so  worthless,  on  the  gambler's 
chance  of  winning  something  less 
wretched  in  an  unknown  beyond. 

Among  all  these  voluble  prophets, 
the  historian  alone  may  not  discuss  the 
problem  for  respect  of  youth,  lest  he 
should  make  still  more  serious  an  issue 
which  was  serious  before  schools  began. 

If  the  silent,  half-conscious,  intuitive 
faith  of  society  could  be  fixed,  it  might 
possibly  be  found  always  tending 
towards   belief  in  a  future   equilibrium 


186  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

of  some  sort,  that  should  end  in 
becoming  stable  ;  an  idea  which  belongs 
to  mechanics,  and  was  probably  the 
first  idea  that  nature  taught  to  a  stone, 
or  to  an  apple ;  to  a  lemur  or  an  ape  ; 
before  teaching  it  to  Newton.  Unfortu- 
nately for  society,  the  physicists  again 
abruptly  interfere,  like  Sancho  Panza's 
doctor,  by  earnest  protests  that,  if  one 
physical  law  exists  more  absolute  than 
another,  it  is  the  law  that  stable  equi- 
librium is  death.  A  society  in  stable 
equilibrium  is — by  definition, — one  that 
has  no  history  and  wants  no  historians. 
Thomson  and  Clausius  startled  the 
world  by  announcing  this  principle  in 
1852 ;  but  the  ants  and  bees  had 
announced  it  some  millions  of  years 
before,  as  a  law  of  organisms,  and  it 
may  have  been  established  still  earlier, 
in   more  convincing   form,  by  some  of 


THE  SOLUTIONS  187 

the  caterpillars.  According  to  the 
recent  doctrine  of  Will  or  Intuition, 
this  conclusion  was  the  first  logical  and 
ultimate  result  reached  in  the  evolution 
of  organic  life ;  but  the  professor  of 
history  who  shall  accept  the  hymen- 
optera  and  lepidoptera  as  teachers  in 
the  place  of  Kelvin  and  Clausius,  will 
probably  find  himself  in  the  same 
dilemma  as  before.  If  he  aims  at 
carrying  his  audience  with  him,  he  will 
have  to  adopt  the  current  view  of  a 
society  rising  to  an  infinitely  high 
potential  of  energy,  and  there  remaining 
in  equilibrium,  the  only  view  which  will 
ensure  him  the  sympathy  of  men,  as 
well  as,  —  probably,  —  of  caterpillars  ; 
but  if  he  wants  to  conciliate  science,  he 
will  have  to  deride  the  idea  of  a  stable 
equilibrium  of  high  potential,  and  insist 
that  no    stable    social   equilibrium   can 


188  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

be  reached  except  by  degrading  social 
energies  to  a  level  where  they  can  fall 
no  further,  and  do  no  more  useful  work. 
Perhaps  this  formula,  too,  may  please 
many  students,  whose  potential  of  vital 
energy, — or,  in  simpler  words,  whose 
love  of  work, — is  less  archaic  than  that 
of  the  ants  and  bees ;  but  as  a  matter 
of  practical  teaching, — as  a  mere  choice 
between  technical  formulas,  —  the  two 
methods  result  in  the  same  dilemma  for 
the  old-fashioned  evolutionist  who  clings 
to  his  ideals  of  indefinite  progress. 
Between  two  equilibriums,  each  mechani- 
cal, and  each  insisting  that  history  is 
at  an  end,  lost  forever  in  the  ocean  of 
statistics,  the  classical  University  teacher 
of  history,  with  his  intuitions  of  free- 
will and  art,  can  exist  only  as  a  sporadic 
survival  to  illustrate  for  his  colleagues 
the  workings  of  their  second  law  of 
thermodynamics. 


THE  SOLUTIONS  189 

To  some  extent,  already,  he  finds 
himself  actually  in  this  awkward  situa- 
tion where  his  colleagues  betray 
impatience  at  his  continued  existence. 
With  singular  unanimity,  the  polite, 
but  embarrassed  authorities  agree  that 
history  is  not  a  science,  and  show 
marked  unwillingness  to  permit  that 
it  shall  ever,  with  their  consent,  become 
one.  Except  on  their  own  terms,  they 
will  have  nothing  to  do  with  human 
evolution,  and  their  terms  commonly 
require  that  they  should  treat  man  as 
a  creature  habitually  striving  to  attain 
imaginary  ideals  always  contrary  to 
law.  His  Will  and  that  of  Nature  have 
been  constantly  at  strife,  and  continue 
to  be  so,  under  the  Baconian  philosophy 
and  the  law  of  Energetik,  as  decidedly 
as  under  the  scholastic  philosophy  and 
the    Sum  ma   of   St.    Thomas    Aquinas. 


190  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

Even  the  friendly  Vitalist  treats  his 
brother  Vitalists  with  candor  not  to  be 
mistaken  for  compliment,  because,  "  in 
the  history  of  humanity  there  is  always 
only  so  much  science  as  there  is  no 
History"  ;  while  the  most  naif  of  all 
the  historian's  naivetes  is  his  favorite 
notion  that  the  *'  understanding "  of  a 
problematic  humanity  can  be  furthered 
by  adding  to  it  a  more  problematic 
phantom  of  Descent.  (Driesch,  "Natur- 
begriffe  und  Natururtheile."  Leipzig, 
1904,  p.  237.)  In  truth,  one  is  driven 
to  admit  that  "  the  theory  of  descent," 
as  Von  Zittel  says,  "  has  introduced  new 
ideas  into  descriptive  natural  history, 
and  has  given  it  a  higher  purpose  ;  but 
we  must  not  forget  that  it  is  still  only 
a  theory,  which  requires  to  be  proved." 
On  this  point,  the  professor  of  history 
who    has    any    smattering     of    special 


THE  SOLUTIONS  191 

training,  knows  all  that  he  needs  to 
knoAV.  He  is  as  free  as  ever  he  was 
to  go  on  compiling  tables  of  dates,  or 
editing,  or  reediting  so-called  *'  docu- 
ments," or  seeking  to  infuse  into  the 
memories  of  his  students  a  sufficient 
acquaintance  with  the  statute  Quia 
Emptores.  He  has  fully  made  up  his 
mind  either  for  or  against  the  exist- 
ence of  any  philosophy  at  all,  as  well 
as  whether  he  is  required  to  lecture 
on  such  a  philosophy  in  case  it  does, 
or  does  not,  exist.  Every  competent 
teacher  of  history  is  supposed,  justly 
or  unjustly,  to  know  his  Herbert 
Spencer  and  Auguste  Comte,  even  if 
not  his  Lamprecht.  When  his  phys- 
iological colleagues  ridicule  his  aspira- 
tions to  science,  the  professor  of  history 
seems  little  disposed  to  resent  their 
attitude,  but  rather  encourages  it ;  and 


192  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

he  is  right,  if  they  are  right,  in  doing 
so ;  but,  none  the  less,  he  finds  himself 
thus  placed,  for  the  first  time  in  three 
hundred  years,  face  to  face  with  a 
painful,  if  not  a  vital  problem.  In 
one  respect  his  dilemma  is  worse  than 
in  the  sixteenth  century,  since  Bacon's 
physical  teaching  aimed  at  freeing  the 
mind  from  a  servitude,  while  the 
law  of  Entropy  imposes  a  servitude 
on  all  energies,  including  the  mental. 
The  degree  of  freedom  steadily  and 
rapidly  diminishes.  Without  rest,  the 
physicists  gently  push  history  down 
the  decline,  as  yet  scarcely  conscious, 
which  they  are  certain  to  plot  out  by 
abscissae  and  ordinates  as  soon  as  they 
can  fix  and  agree  upon  a  sufiScient 
number  of  normal  variables,  not  with 
conscious  intention  but  by  unconscious 
extension.      Every    reader    of    current 


THE  SOLUTIONS  193 

literature  knows  that  the  subject  is 
touched  by  half  the  books  he  reads, 
and  that  the  most  popular  are  the 
most  outspoken.  Few  volumes  are 
more  widely  known  than  M.  Gustave 
Le  Bon's  "  Physiologic  des  Foules," 
(1895),  which  closes  with  the  following 
paragraph  :  — 

"  That  which  formed  a  people,  a 
unity,  a  block,  ends  by  becoming  an 
agglomeration  of  individuals  without 
cohesion,  still  held  together  for  a  time 
by  its  traditions  and  institutions.  This 
is  the  phase  when  men,  divided  by  their 
interests  and  aspirations,  but  no  longer 
knowing  how  to  govern  themselves,  ask 
to  be  directed  in  their  smallest  acts  ;  and 
when  the  State  exercises  its  absorbing 
influence.  With  the  definitive  loss  of 
the  old  ideal,  the  race  ends  by  entirely 
losing  its  soul ;  it  becomes  nothing  more 
13 


194  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

than  a  dust  of  isolated  individuals,  and 
returns  to  what  it  was  at  the  start, — a 
crowd." 

Under  the  thinnest  veil  of  analogy 
the  physicist-historian,  with  scientific 
calmness,  condemns  our  actual  society  as 
he  condemns  the  sun  ;  for  the  ** crowd" 
which  Gustave  Le  Bon  declares  to  be 
the  end  of  social  evolution  is  not  at 
all  the  same  "  crowd "  that  made  its 
beginning,  and  is  wholly  incapable  of 
doing  useful  work.  Gustave  Le  Bon  is 
himself  a  physicist  of  wide  renown,  but 
he  is  remarkable  also  as  director  of  the 
"  Bibliotheque  de  Philosophic  Scien- 
tifique,"  the  best  known  of  all  recent 
attempts  to  lighten  the  load  of  technical 
instruction  and  of  scientific  baggage. 
Among  the  most  recent  of  these 
admirable  volumes  is  one  on  "  Degra- 
dation "    (Paris,    November,    1908),    by 


THE  SOLUTIONS  195 

M.  Bernliard  Brunhes,  whose  position 
as  Director  of  the  Observatory  of  the 
Puy  de  Dome  guarantees  his  competence 
to  narrate  the  story.  In  one  or  two 
paragraphs,  with  the  lucidity  which  so 
often  distinguishes  French  thought  from 
that  of  some  other  races,  M.  Brunhes 
summarizes  the  values  of  the  two 
philosophies  of  history  : — 

"  The  preceding  remarks  give  the  key 
to  the  apparent  oj^position  which  exists 
between  the  doctrine  of  Evolution  and 
the  principle  of  Degradation  of  energy. 
Physical  science  presents  to  us  a  world 
which  is  unceasingly  wearing  itself  out. 
A  philosophy  which  claims  to  derive 
support  from  biology,  paints  compla- 
cently, on  the  contrary,  a  world  steadily 
improving,  in  which  physiological  life 
goes  on  always  growing  perfect  to  the 
point  of  reaching  full  consciousness  of 


196  LETTEE  TO  TEACHERS 

itself  in  man,  and  where  no  limit  seems 
imposed  on  eternal  progress.  Observe 
that  this  second  idea,  —  of  indefinite 
progress,  —  has  furnished  much  more 
material  than  the  first,  for  literary 
development !  This  is  no  doubt  because 
the  scientific  facts  on  which  it  is  con- 
structed lend  themselves  to  vulgarisation 
far  more  easily  than  the  scientific  facts 
whose  combination  forms  the  principle 
of  Carnot.  From  our  point  of  view 
the  principle  of  degradation  of  energy 
would  prove  nothing  against  the  fact 
of  Evolution.  The  progressive  trans- 
formation of  species,  the  realisation  of 
more  perfect  organisms,  contain  nothing 
contrary  to  the  idea  of  the  constant 
loss  of  useful  energy.  Only  the  vast 
and  grandiose  conceptions  of  imagina- 
tive philosophers  who  erect  into  an 
absolute  principle  the  law  of  *  universal 


THE  SOLUTIONS  197 

progress,'  could  no  longer  hold  against 
one  of  the  most  fundamental  ideas 
that  physics  reveals  to  us.  On  one 
side,  therefore,  the  world  wears  out ; 
on  another  side,  the  appearance  on 
earth  of  living  beings  more  and  more 
elevated,  and,  —  in  a  slightly  different 
order  of  ideas,  —  the  development  of 
civilisation  in  human  society,  undoubt- 
edly give  the  impression  of  a  progress 
and  a  gain."  (p.  193.) 

This,  then,  is  the  extreme  limit  of 
the  physicists'  concessions.  If  a  com- 
promise is  to  be  made,  it  must  rest 
there.  The  degradationist  can  so  far 
ameliorate  the  immediate  rigor  of  his 
law  as  to  admit  that  degradation  of 
energy  may  create,  or  convey,  an 
impression  of  progress  and  gain ;  but 
if  the  evolutionist  presses  the  inquiry 
further,   and   asks  where  this  proposed 


198  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

compromise  will  lead  him  as  a  teacher 
of  young  men,  —  what  future  reality 
lies  behind  the  impression  of  progress, 
—  what  amount  of  illusion  is  to  be 
reckoned  as  an  independent  variable 
in  the  formula  of  gain,  —  the  degrada- 
tionist  replies,  quite  candidly  and 
honestly,  that  this  impression  of  gain 
is  derived  from  an  impression  of  Order 
due  to  the  levelling  of  energies ;  but 
that  the  impression  of  Order  is  an 
illusion  consequent  on  the  dissolution 
of  the  higher  Order  which  had  supplied, 
by  lowering  its  inequalities,  all  the 
useful  energies  that  caused  progress. 
The  reality  behind  the  illusion,  is, 
therefore,  absence  of  the  power  to  do 
useful  work,  —  or  what  man  knows,  in 
his  finite  sensibilities,  as  death  :  — 

"  Thus  Order  in  the  material  universe 
would  be  the  mark  of  utility  and  the 


THE  SOLUTIONS  199 

measure  of  value ;  and  tbis  Order, 
far  from  being  spontaneous,  would  tend 
constantly  to  destroy  itself  Yet  tbe 
Disorder  towards  wbicb  a  collection  of 
molecules  moves,  is  in  no  respect  tbe 
initial  cbaos  ricb  in  differences  and 
inequalities  tbat  generate  useful  ener- 
gies ;  on  tbe  contrary  it  is  tbe  average 
mean  of  equality  and  bomogeneity  in 
absolute  want  of  coordination."  (p.  53.) 
Perbaps  an  instructor  needs  a  memory 
extending  over  sixty  years  in  order  to 
measure  tbe  revolution  in  tbougbt  wbicb 
sucb  teacbing  implies.  Every  rigbt- 
minded  University  Professor  of  1850 
dismissed  tbe  ideas  of  Kelvin,  as  be 
did  tbose  of  Maltbus,  Karl  Marx  and 
Scbopenbauer,  as  fantastic.  Tbey 
sbocked  bim,  partly  for  tbeir  extrava- 
gance but  cbiefly  for  wbat  be  regarded 
as     tbeir     destructive    pessimism.      In 


200  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

1910,  an  American  professor  who  should 
try  to  get  below  the  surface  of  thought 
in  Germany,  Italy,  France,  or  even  in 
England,  would  probably  incline  to 
the  conclusion  that  Schopenhauer  may 
be  regarded  as  an  optimist.  In  reality 
pessimists  and  optimists  have  united  on 
a  system  of  science  which  makes 
pessimism  the  logical  foundation  of 
optimism.  History  is  the  victim  of 
both.  Let  any  young  student  take  up 
the  last  German  book  on  Biology  that 
happens  to  fall  under  his  eyes.  Within 
the  first  hundred  pages  he  is  fairly  sure 
to  come  upon  some  assertion  or  assump- 
tion of  the  second  law  of  thermody- 
namics in  its  dogmatic  form  : — 

"  The  Energetik  of  the  living  organism 
consists,  then,  in  the  last  analysis,  in  the 
fact  that  the  organism,  when  left  to 
itself,  tends  in  the  direction  of  a  stable 


THE  SOLUTIONS  201 

equilibrium  under  the  surrender  of 
energy  to  the  outer  world.  The  reach- 
ing of  the  stable  equilibrium,  —  even 
the  mere  approach  to  it, — means  death. 
In  this  respect  the  organism  acts  like  a 
clock  that  has  run  down."  (Reinke, 
"  Einleitung  in  die  theoretische  Biolo- 
gie,"  p.  152.) 

In  1852,  Thomson  contented  himself 
by  saying  that  a  restoration  of  energy 
is  "  probably  "  never  effected  by  organ- 
ised matter.  In  1910,  there  is  nothing 
"  probable "  about  it ;  the  fact  has 
become  an  axiom  of  biology.  In  1852, 
any  University  professor  would  have 
answered  this  quotation  by  the  dry 
remark  that  society  was  not  an  organism, 
and  that  history  was  not  a  science,  since 
it  could  not  be  treated  mathematically. 
Today,  M.  Bernhard  Brunhes  seems  to 
feel  no  doubt  that  society  is  an  organism, 


202  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

and  the  physicists  invariably  stretch 
Kelvin's  law  over  all  organised  matter 
whatever.  Instead  of  being  a  mere 
convenience  in  treatment,  the  law  is 
very  rapidly  becoming  a  dogma  of 
absolute  Truth.  As  long  as  the  theory 
of  Degradation, — as  of  Evolution, — was 
only  one  of  the  convenient  tools  of 
science,  the  sociologist  had  no  just  cause 
for  complaint.  Every  science,  —  and 
mathematics  first  of  all, — uses  what  tools 
it  likes.  The  Professor  of  Physics  is 
not  teaching  Ethics ;  he  is  training 
young  men  to  handle  concrete  energy 
in  one  or  more  of  its  many  forms,  and 
he  has  no  choice  but  to  use  the  most 
convenient  formulas.  Unfortunately 
the  formula  most  convenient  for  him  is 
not  at  all  convenient  for  his  colleagues 
in  sociology  and  history,  without  press- 
ing   the    inquiry    further,    into    more 


THE  SOLUTIONS  203 

intimate  branches  of  practice  like 
medicine,  jurisprudence  and  politics. 
If  the  entire  universe,  in  every  variety 
of  active  energy,  organic  and  inorganic, 
human  or  divine,  is  to  be  treated  as 
clock-work  that  is  running  down,  society 
can  hardly  go  on  ignoring  the  fact 
forever.  Hitherto  it  has  often  happened 
that  two  systems  of  education,  like  the 
Scholastic  and  Baconian,  could  exist 
side  by  side  for  centuries, — as  they  exist 
still, — in  adjoining  schools  and  universi- 
ties, by  no  more  scientific  device  than 
that  of  shutting  their  eyes  to  each  other  ; 
but  the  universe  has  been  terribly 
narrowed  by  thermodynamics.  Already 
History  and  Sociology  gasp  for  breath. 
The  department  of  history  needs  to 
concert  with  the  departments  of  biology, 
sociology  and  psychology  some  common 
formula  or  figure  to  serve  their  students 


204  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

as  a  working  model  for  their  study 
of  tlie  vital  energies ;  and  this  figure 
must  be  brought  into  accord  with  the 
figures  or  formulas  used  by  the  depart- 
ment of  physics  and  mechanics  to 
serve  their  students  as  models  for 
the  working  of  physico-chemical  and 
mechanical  energies.  Without  the  ad- 
hesion of  physicists,  the  model  would 
cause  greater  scandal  than  though  the 
contradictions  were  silently  ignored  as 
now  ;  but  the  biologists,  —  or,  at  least, 
the  branches  of  science  concerned  with 
humanity,  —  will  find  great  difficulty 
in  agreeing  on  any  formula  which  does 
not  require  from  physics  the  abandon- 
ment, in  part,  of  the  second  law  of 
thermodynamics.  The  mere  formal 
exception  of  Keason  from  the  express 
operation  of  the  law,  as  a  matter  of 
teaching  in  the  workshop,  is  not  enough. 


THE  SOLUTIONS  205 

Either  the  law  must  be  abandoned  in 
respect  to  Vital  Energy  altogether,  or 
Vital  Energy  must  abandon  Reason 
altogether  as  one  of  its  forms,  and 
return  to  the  old  dilemma  of  Descartes. 
Meanwhile  nothing  prevents  each 
instructor  from  aiming  to  unite  with 
each  of  his  colleagues  in  some  sort 
of  approach  to  a  common  understanding 
about  the  first  principle  of  instruction  ; 
if  each  University  solves  the  problem 
to  its  own  satisfaction,  the  problem  is, 
in  so  far,  solved  for  the  whole ;  and 
nothing  need  hamper  the  effort  of  the 
Universities  to  carry  the  process  further, 
if  it  promises  advantage.  If  the 
physicists  and  physico-chemists  can  at 
last  find  their  way  to  an  arrangement 
that  would  satisfy  the  sociologists  and 
historians,  the  problem  would  be  wholly 
solved.     Such  a  complete  solution  seems 


206  LETTER  TO  TEACHERS 

not  impossible  ;  but  at  present,  —  for 
the  moment,  —  as  the  stream  runs,  — 
it  also  seems,  to  an  impartial  bystander, 
to  call  for  the  aid  of  another  Newton. 


INDEX 


Aeschylus,  180 
Agassiz,  Louis,  64 
Ant-eaters,  151 
Antliropoid   ancestors,    55 
Anthropology,  53-67,  94, 
172 


Augustine,  Saint,  160 
Aquinas,    Saint     Thomas, 

92,  189 
Aristotle,  91,  92 
Arndt,  63,  168 


Bacon,  Lord,  81,  139,  192 
Bain,  Alex.,  107 
Bancroft,  George,   13 
Bergson,  Henri,   "L' Evo- 
lution Creatrice,"  108- 
110 
Berlin,  74,  83,  179 
Bernoulli,  Daniel,  86 
Blandet,    theory    of    solar 
contraction,  38,  45 


Brain,  evolution  of,  62, 
63,   102 

Branco,  63,  168 

Brunhes,  Bernhard,  "De- 
gradation," 194-197, 
201 

Bruno,  Giordano,  85 

Buckle,  Henry  Thomas, 
14 

Bunyan,  John, 156 


Carboniferous   period,    38, 

46,  136,  140,  148 
Carnot,  Sadi,  2,  196 
Chemical  energy,  26,  161 
Church,  the,  154,  157,  183 
Ciamician,    Professor   Gia- 
como,  91,  96 


Clausius,N.,2,  4,  93,  158, 

186 
Comte,  Auguste,   191 
Consciousness,    chiefly  In- 
telligence,     109,     111, 
144 

207 


208 


INDEX 


Conservation  of  Energy,  Creative     Evolution,     by 


Law  of,  1,   2,  2i,  119, 
120,  128 

stated  by  Tyndall,  6-10 
Cope,  E.  D.,  56,  59 
Creative     Evolution,     93, 

103,  106,  146, 147,  148, 

153,  155,  172 


Henri    Bergson,     108- 

110 
Cretaceous  period,  38 
Crusades,  154 


D 


Daimler  motor,  167 

Dalton,  John,  86 

Dana,  James  D. ,  "  Man- 
ual of  Geology,"  151, 
152 

D'Archiae  and  Blandet,  38 

Darwin,  Charles,  on  the 
eye,  149,  150,  his  Law 
of  Evolution,  21,  22, 
23,  33,  37,  64,  96,  134, 
174,  190 

Dastre,  A.,  "La  Vie  et 
la  Mort,"  25-27 

"Decline  and   Fall,"  181 

"Degradation,"  by  Bern- 
hard  F.runhes,  194-197 

Degradation     of     Energy, 
(See    Dissipation)    20, 
26,  39,  152 
equivalent  to  diffusion, 

122,  123 
applies     to     all     vital 
processes,  25,  26,  27, 
117,  200-202 


Degradation  of  Energy, 
convenience  of,  174 
social  bearings  of,  30, 
78,  178,  196,  197, 
198 
used  for  history,  181- 
183 

De  Morgan,  J. ,  "  Les  Pre- 
mieres Civilisations," 
71-73,  77 

Descartes,  Ren^,  81,  158, 
159,  205 

Dissipation  of  Energy,  Law 
of,  2-4,  10,  11,  14,  15, 
16,  24,  68,  148,  200 
applies    to    vital    pro- 
cesses,   8,    4,    25-27, 
52,   78,  79,   124,  133 

Dollo's  Law  of  Evolution, 
52 

Driesch,  Dr.  Hans,  "  Der 
Vitalismus"  13,  "Na- 
turbegriffe,"  190 

Drosera,  176 


INDEX 


209 


E 


Egypt,  179 

Electricity,  26,  100,  137 

Energetik  (See  Tlierrao- 
dynamics),  90,  98,  119, 
189,  200 

Energy,  Laws  of,  1-4,  18, 
19,  20,  24,  26,  79,  93, 
161,  170,  200,  201 
phases  of,  15,  16,  90 
storage  of,  124 
unity  of,  90,  173 
(See  Conservation,  De- 
gradation,  Dissipation, 
Vital,  Chemical,  Mon- 
ism). 

Entelechy,  93 

Entropy,  Law  of,  5,  17, 
25,  120,  166,  176,  192 

Eocene  period,  36,  148 

Evolution,  Darwin's  law 
of,  21,  22,  23,  24,  29, 
39,  157 


Evolution,  Lyell's  law  of 
uniformity  of,  22 

contradicted  by  Sa- 
porta,  35-39 
by  Lapparent,  44 
by  Dollo,  52 

equivalent  to  Trans- 
formation, 87,  122, 
174 

consistent  with  Degra- 
dation, 195-197 

regressive,  66 

of  man  from  lemur,  56, 
61,  94,  170 

of  the  eye,  106,  149,150 

applied  to  history,  180^ 
188,  195-197 
Eye,    evolution  of,   106^ 

149,  150 


Faye,  Hervd  Auguste  Eti- 
enne  Albans,  astrono- 
mer, "  Sur  I'Originedu 
Monde,"  16-18,  152 

Flammarion,    Camille, 
"  Astronomic    Popu- 
laire,"    73-76,  77,  84, 
152 

Galileo,  85,  122,  139,  159 
Gaudry,  Albert,  "Essaide 
14 


Flechsig,  Paul,  104 
Form,  92,  138,  143 
Free-will,  107,  159,  160 


G 


Pal^ontologie   Philoso- 
phique,"  48,  148,  160 


210 


INDEX 


Gaudry,  Albsrt,  on  the 

eye,  150 
Geology,  of  Lyell,  22 
of  Lapparent, 

41-50,  147,  148 
of  Dana,  151,  152 
Gibbs,  Willard,  86,  168 
Glacial  period,  48 
date  of,  69 


Glacial     period,    expected 
return  of,  66,  69-78 
degradation  of   life  in, 
151,  152 

Gravitation,  5,  143,  175 

Gray,  Professor  Andrew, 
"Lord  Kelvin,"  18, 
19,  178 

Gulliver,  144 


H 


Haeckel,  Ernst,  23,  28,  54 

Hartraann,     Eduard    von, 
20,  21,  97,  158 
' '  Philosopliie  des  Un- 
bewussten,"   91,   108 

Heat,    waste  of,  6,  7,  10, 
15,  26,  79,  131,  135, 147 
development  of,  162 
a     falling      substance, 
10,  176 

Heer,  Oswald,  "  Flora  fos- 
silis  Arctica,"  35,  46 


Hegel,     Georg     Wilhelm 

Fried  rich,  14 
Helmholz,  Ferdinand  von, 

2,  4,  158 
History     in      relation     to 

vScience,  12,  14,  18,  23, 

113,  127,  185,  186,  189 
Hopf,    Ludwig,    "Human 

Species,"  59-64,  168 
Huxley,    Thomas    Henry, 

66 


Inertia,  31,  32 
Instinct,  32,  62,  89,  90, 
108-110,  155,  187 


Intuition,  92,  110,  187 


Joly,  Prof.  J.  "  Radioac- 
tivity and  Geology," 
171 


INDEX 


211 


K 


Kant,  Immanuel,  81 
Kelvin,  Lord  (Sir  William 
Thomson),  2,  10,  11, 
37,  65,  139,  152,  158, 
169,  170,  174,  186,  199, 
20] 

his  law  of  thermody- 
namics, 3,  4,  14,  16, 
21,  24.  175 


Kelvin,  Lord,  life  of,  18 
Klaatsch,      Professor,      of 

Heidelberg,  59 
Krainski,      N.,      "Gesetz 

der  Erhaltung  der  En- 

ergie,"  98 


Lalande,  A. ,  "  Dissolu- 
tion," 107 

Lamprecht,  Karl  G.,  191 

Language,  95,  179 

Lapparent,  A.  de,  "  Traite 
de  Geologie,"  41-44, 
47,  48,  49,  50,  77,  85, 
88,  152 

Le  Bon,  Gustave,  193,  194 

Lemur,  ancestor  of  man, 
56,  57,  94,  170 

Macaulay,    Lord,    13,    80, 

180 
Malthus,  T.  R,  199 
Man  (See  Anthropology), 
an  agent  of  waste,  131- 
134,  135,   155,  156 
his  appearance   on 
earth,  48,  172 

Nature  as  economist,  129, 
130,  135 


Lex  Poppaea,  82 
Loeb,  Jacques,  98,  101 
London,  180 

Common  Council  of,  82 
Lyell,    Sir     Charles,    his 

"  Principles,"  35 

his  law  of  uniformity, 
22,  33 

abandoned    by   Lappa- 
rent, 43,  44 


M 


Man,  a  form  of   vital  en- 
ergy, 88,  94 

Marx,  Karl,  14,  199 

Miocene    period,    began 
degradation,  38,  47 

Monism,  90,  173,  175 
advantages  of,  174 


N 


Nature,  full  of  rival  ener- 
gies, 143 


212 


INDEX 


Nature,     equilibrium     of,  Nietzsche,  Friedrich  Wil- 

46,  148,  186  helm,  97 

Newton,    Sir  Isaac,    3,    5,  Nippur,  69 

37,  157,  186,  206 

O 

Order  in  the  universe,  198,  Ostwald,  Wilhelm,  4,  25, 

199  98,  100,  166 


Panmixia,  165 
Pessimism,  199,  200 
Phases,  15,  16,  86,  90,  168 
Pheidias,  180 
Physical  forces  since  1830, 
161,  182  (See  Energy). 


Pindar,  180 
Poincar^,  H.,  173 
Poincare,  Lucien,  5,  171 
Psychology,  98-106,  163- 
166 


R 


Radium,  130,  153,  171 
Reason  (see Thought),  62, 
89,  95,  153,  155,  157, 
162,  167,  204,  205 
an   arrested    Act,    107> 

111,  155,  176,  177 
a  result  of  tropism,  99, 

100 
an  instrument  of  Will, 

116,  155 


Reinke,     Dr.    J.,     "  Ein- 

leitung,"  108,  171,  172, 

200,  201 
Remopleurides,  150 
Rosa's   law  of  progressive 

reduction,  52,  65 
Rostand,  Edmond,  180 
Rousseau,    Jean    Jacques, 

107,  168 


Saporta,  Comte  de,  ' '  Le 
Monde  des  Plantes," 
35,  36,  37,  47,  148 


Schopenhauer,  Arthur, 
"Die  Welt  alsWille," 
91,  92,  97,  199,  200 


INDEX 


213 


Scorpion,  145,  146 

Socialist    theories  of    his- 
tory, 67,  185 

Solar  energy,    inexhausti- 
ble, 5,  6-11 
dissipation   of,  13,    15, 
49,  68-70,  148 

Southey,  Robert,  80 


Spencer,  Herbert,  191 
Stationary  epoch,  186 
Stewart,  Balfour,  158 
Sun,  contraction  of,  38,  41- 
43,  49 

storage-power  of,  130 
waste  of,  7,  8,  134,  135 
Swift,  Dean,  156,  181 


Tait,   Peter  Guthrie,  5,  8 

Thermodynamics,   Law  of, 

3-4,  10,  14,  16,  19,  20, 

21,  24,  145,  148,  155, 

159 

applies  to  vital  energy, 

25-27,  67,  68,  88,  93, 

95,  188,  200 

to   Thought  and  Will, 

116,  117 

Thomson,  Dr.  Hanna,  102, 

103,  105 
Thomson,    Sir    William 

(See  Kelvin). 
Thought,   a   mode  of  mo- 
tion, 102,  137,  163 
a  diffused  energy,    140 
an  intense  energy,  112, 
113,  139,    153,    154, 
162 

Uniformity,    Lyell's    Law 
of,  22,  43,  44 


Thought,      the      ultimate 

energy,  113,  137,  138 

an    arrested    act,     107, 

111,  177 
an  organic  growth,  104 
106 
Times,  the  London,  83 
Topinard,    Paul,    62,    63, 

65-68 
Transformation,       equiva- 
lent  to   Evolution  and 
Degradation,    87,    122, 
174,  196 
Tropism,  99,  101,  163 
Tyndall,      John,      "  Heat 
considered   as  a   Mode 
of   Motion,"  6-11,  13, 
15 


U 


Unity,  the  Ultimate,  (See 
Monism) 


214 


INDEX 


Universities,    of    Europe, 
their  attitude    towards 


Evolution,     159,    164, 
167,  168,  179,  182, 183 


Vital  Energy,   7,  8,   165, 

167,  188,  205 

falls  under  the  law  of 
thermodynamics,  3, 
15,  17,  18-21,  25,  26, 
27,  78,  93,  140,  142, 
148,  165,  166,  200 

man  a  form  of,  88 

an  independent  energy, 
12,  13,  16,  24,  141 


Vital  Energy,  intensity  of, 
106,  146,  146,  147,  148, 
154 

the  subject  of  History,  23 
the  Will  its  potential, 
91 
Vitalism,    Driesch's    His- 
tory of,  13,  190 
Voltaire,  156 


W 


Wagner,  Eichard,  183 
Will,  the  potential  of  vital 
Energy,     90-96,     155, 

187 
mechanical    attraction, 

101,  102 
supernatural,  103,  105, 
106,  113 


Will,  absorbed  by  mechan- 
anical    energy,  163 
intensity  of,  145 

Wundt,  Wilhelm,  "Sys- 
tem der  Philosophie," 
97 


Zittel,    Karl   Alfred   von, 
190 


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